Nexus II
by Black Dragon6
Summary: Death and chaos have been sown throughout the Eastern world. Guess who's job it is to clean up?
1. The Death March

Nexus II  
by Black Dragon  
  
  
Disclaimer is as follows: I do not own Ranma or any of the given Ranma 1/2 characters. I do own everyone I make up. Which is a lot of people, actually.  
  
Chapter 1  
The Death March  
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"Ranma! Where are you boy?!" Genma yelled out into the forest, fists planted on his hips. Looking around, the thick walls of trees and bushes made movement difficult, and Genma was rather hoping that his voice carried far enough that he wouldn't have to go get his son. Wouldn't really know where to look, anyway.  
After a moment, the soft noises of leaves and twigs being stepped of traveled toward the camp site, and Genma's 10 year-old son broke through the brush into the clearing.  
"What's the matter, Pop?"  
Genma frowned. "Boy, just what took you so long?! I told you to wait here while I was off in town!"  
Ranma shrugged, unconcerned. "I was just hanging out by the cliff. It's not that far."  
Genma snorted. Ranma had taken a liking for a small, grassy overhang that looked over the town from high atop a cliff. A nice spot, really, but Genma had hardly taken Ranma here to admire the view. "If you have so much energy boy, then you can practice your exercises when I'm not here! Now make yourself useful and get some firewood!" Sitting down gruffly, Genma watched out of the corner of his eye as Ranma entered the forest, muttering irritably.  
After he had gone, Genma slumped down onto the ground and sighed heavily.  
He had chosen this particular area because it was rumored that a powerful martial arts master had made his home in town, and used the massive temple that overlooked the town from the surrounding forest as a training ground to teach powerful techniques.  
Those rumors, it turned out, were true. Unfortunately, Genma was not aware before he had met the man that they had crossed paths before.  
To be precise, that same martial arts master, or to be even more precise, his daughter, had experienced the great misfortunate of being targeted by Happousai (may the evil lecher rot in his cave) during Genma's younger training days. Genma's memory of what had happened was sketchy (such an incident was just one of many), but he had to guess that it had involved the theft of a lot of underwear, and a few simple inquiries around town had confirmed that the girl involved had been mentally scarred for life.  
Needless to say, while the old coot that ran the dojo hadn't attacked him on sight and had even listened to his tales of abuse and misfortune at Happousai's hands, neither Genma nor Ranma was going to get any training from him.  
Genma halted in his thoughts, and went over that last point. Actually, the man had never met Ranma, and had no idea what Ranma looked like...  
  
Once again, the disturbance of the surrounding plants announced Ranma's return to the camp.  
"About time, boy," Genma chided absently, "hurry up and get that fire started."  
Ranma grunted to himself and dropped the heavy load of chopped wood onto the ground. He had long ago tacked down the pattern to his father's demands, and had actually spent most of Genma's trip to town chopping up a dead log about half a kilometer from the camp site.  
Moving a pile of dead leaves into the center of the fire pit, Ranma began stacking the wood for the fire.  
Genma sat pondering to himself. Ranma could request the training by himself, and the old fool probably wouldn't make any connection by himself. However, Ranma couldn't be allowed to reveal his parentage, nor could Genma afford to let it get back to the aging martial artist that Ranma came back to him every day.  
Genma yawned mightily. Thinking always made him tired.  
Putting his thoughts aside for the next day, Genma looked toward the setting sun and the rapidly darkening sky. "Might as well go to sleep now and get an early start tomorrow. Get that fire up, boy."  
Ranma frowned as he fished a match from his pocket. "But what about dinner Pop?"  
Genma snorted and sat down on a tree. "Stupid boy! Haven't I taught you anything!? Go forage for food or something! It will make a man out of you!" Genma muttered incoherently a bit before relaxing on the ground. "Besides, I already ate."  
Ranma's left eye twitched irritably as Genma made himself comfortable. Nevertheless, he lit the fire quickly, striking the match on a nearby rock.  
Mumbling quietly about the injustices of life, Ranma went to his backpack and fished some bread out of it.  
He pulled it out of the wrapping he used to keep it from getting stale, and was about to take a bite, when he suddenly heard the sharp, but muffled noise of distant movement. Staring into the rapidly darkening forest, Ranma frowned as the sounds became louder. Obviously the travelers were making little, if any, attempt to conceal their passage.  
*Crunch* *Snap*  
Ranma looked toward his father. "Hey Pop! Someone's comin'!"  
Genma opened one eye, then sighed and started to pay more attention to the noises coming from the forest. Whatever was moving through the forest was making too much of a racket to be a woodland animal, even a large one. From the timing of the noise, Genma also guessed that whoever the travelers were, there were several of them.  
The stout martial artist snorted as the noises began to get more distant. Whoever it was had missed the camp site. "Stop your whining boy! We're not the only ones in these woods." With that, Genma turned himself over and closed his eyes again.  
Ranma looked dubiously into the shadows between the trees. "I dunno Pop. That was an awful lot of noise. And why wouldn't they just use the paths near town?"  
"Knock it off boy! I'm trying to sleep!" Genma growled. "Stop whining about the dark like a little girl and go to bed!"  
Ranma glared at his father for a moment, then sighed and began eating his bread. After a few moments, he licked the last of the crumbs off his fingers, and after closing up his backpack again, set up his bedding near the small flame in the center of the clearing.  
Laying out on the blanket, Ranma made himself as comfortable as possible over the hard ground. Not that it mattered much; he had been out on the road for four years, and for him, anything better than pointy rocks was the height of luxury.  
Sighing deeply, Ranma cast a last look into the forest, now a pitch black as the light from the sun deserted it completely. Then he turned over, and quickly fell into a deep slumber.  
__________________________________________________________________________________  
  
*Crunch* *Snap* *Thwap!*  
"Fshaaa!" Insecticoid mandibles hissed angrily as yet another tree branch whipped back to strike large, compound eyes. More noises were made as the creature grabbed the entire branch in thick, bony talons and snapped off the branch completely.  
Ahead of him, three others of his kind ignored the frustration of their companion, as each was having a fair amount of trouble getting through themselves. Realistically, the rear had it much easier, as the large, bulky warriors cleared quite a path in front of them.  
Vicoids were large, able-bodied creatures, born and bred for conflict. Though their biology was quite reminiscent of insects, their body structure was undeniably humanoid in nature, with two huge legs and slightly smaller arms that were made to drive powerfully through anything and everything in the warrior's way. Their hands were unusually large, and each surprisingly flexible finger ended in a slightly curved, razor-sharp claw. Their bodies were natural pieces of armor, with thick, bony exoskeletons that formed blunt horns at the shoulders, elbows and knees.  
At the moment, this procession of mighty creatures was hacking their way through thick forest, a terrain type with did NOT suit the bulky warriors one bit. Each was armed with a rectangular, crudely forged sword, which were being put to use in cutting thick shrubbery out of the way.  
The lead vicoid fiercely tried to cut away a low-hanging branch, and ended up getting his taloned foot caught in the thick underbrush. While he ripped the plants from the ground in frustration, the warrior following him fought to get in a position to help, finding it difficult to squeeze his seven-foot frame around the webs of tree branches.  
{"Why couldn't we just use the paths? This is annoying!"}  
The lead vicoid growled as he wrenched his foot free, then savagely clawed at the obstruction, tearing away an entire section of the trunk and bringing down the branch that had blocked his path. {"Because we cannot alert the humans, that's why. You know that!"}  
The third vicoid clicked his mandibles together rapidly in annoyance. {"Our orders are to kill any humans that see us! We could just cut our way through any humans we found."}  
A sharp hiss answered him, and the leader turned back to the path he was forging. {"Our orders also say to make our own path! If it's not going quickly enough, get up here and help us."}  
{"So here's where you all are. Glad I found you so quickly."}  
  
All of the bulky warriors stopped, confused. The voice had come out of nowhere, and lacked the obvious vocal inflictions that came from speaking through a vicoid's unique respiratory system.  
The last creature turned cautiously, and noted a human boy hanging from a tree branch next to the very obvious-looking path they had left behind. He looked to be around 14, and was rather short for his age to boot. He was wearing a simple brown cloak that flowed about a foot below his waist, revealing a pair of black pants and heavy boots. What little light penetrated the canopy of the forest glinted off a long object that was tied to his back.  
The second vicoid in the procession clapped his mandibles together hard in an imitation of a snort. {"Just a human. Kill him."}  
The third one cautiously moved into a guard position, even though the last warrior's body shielded him completely in the fairly narrow path. {"'Just' a human?! No humans around here speak Gaerieth!"}  
The last vicoid clicked his mandibles lightly in interest. {"So he's an educated human."} He turned his crested head back towards those ahead of him, {"Continue on. I'll deal with this one and make sure no one followed him."}  
The two lead vicoids turned wordlessly, and once again began hacking noisily at the brush.  
The boy let go of the branch, and fell to the ground in a crouch, eyeing the creature warily as it approached him.  
{"Unusual to find a human that speaks our tongue, boy. Out of respect for the time you've apparently wasted to learn it, what's your name?"}  
He smirked, oddly enough. Not much fear in him. The vicoid could admire that.  
{"My name is Rayden, insect."} With that, he reached behind him and drew a large, 4-foot broadsword out of its sheath, the fine-edged blade glinting in the sparse moonlight.  
The two antennae atop the vicoid's head twitched, and he felt his companion behind him shifting positions. Something about that sword was alerting his senses...  
"HYAH!!!" *Shyang!* Rayden crossed the distance between him and the first vicoid in a lightning charge, cutting upward in a wide arc with both hands. His sword sliced easily into the thick carapace of the warrior creature, and slowed only slightly before breaking free of the cut. Rayden brought the sword around in a horizontal swing to the screeching vicoid's midsection, and this time the sword chopped firmly into his opponent's side before pushing the creature into the surrounding trees, removing it from the path.  
With a fair deal of effort, Rayden yanked his blade free, sparing the wounded vicoid a short glance as it fell heavily into the treeline, green ooze flooding from the large gash over its heavy chest plate.  
The second vicoid holding up the rear had been far more prepared for something like this, and met Rayden with sword swinging.  
*Clang!* Rayden held his sword out perpendicular to the incoming slash to block, then batted his enemy's sword to the side with a powerful swing, which came back around to chop a shallow cut into the vicoid's chest plate.  
The vicoid returned with a straight punch, and Rayden once again blocked the strong attack with the flat of his broadsword, grunting at the power behind the blow. Never the less, he swiftly dropped his guard and cut upward into his foe's shoulder, slicing a painful groove into the softer tissue of the vicoid's underarm before smashing a haymaker straight into the large warrior with his left hand.  
Much to the staggering vicoid's surprise, the punch had a surprising measure of strength behind it, and found himself lifted off the ground as he was knocked onto his back. From his many-faceted view while on the ground, he could see that his companions on the path ahead were approaching to help, and that the first vicoid to be attacked had gotten to his feet.  
Rayden had apparently also realized this, as the boy ducked under a horizontal swing, and then twisted around for a powerful roundhouse that smashed his first target back into the surrounding foliage.  
Returning to the more able vicoids, Rayden smirked. The two uninjured ones were unable to squeeze past the wounded warrior that was now getting to his knees, and would be forced to fight him one on one, or get in each other's way.  
The wounded vicoid launched himself forward, stabbing with his sword. With calculated precision, Rayden deflected the clumsy blade with his own, then kicked the vicoid in the stomach, stopping the charge. Slamming his sword down onto his opponent's wrist, Rayden disarmed the creature before grabbing the arm that had been cut at the shoulder, and tucked it under his own arm with his foot still planted on the vicoid's carapace.  
*Shkrick!* "SHRREEEEEEEE!!!" The vicoid warrior screeched in agony as its arm was torn completely off, and thrashed about wildly with the bare claws of its right hand. It was lightly rewarded as his claws found purchase on Rayden's cloak and ripped into the flesh underneath the thin material, but this position put its head far too close to its opponent than was really advisable.  
*Krauk!* Grasping the back of the dismembered hand and holding the large claws between his fingers, the young swordsman savagely shoved the sharp nails into the large, compound eyes of the staggering monster, eliciting another screech of agony before he backed away from the wildly thrashing creature.  
In a disgusting sort of way, it was quite comical to watch as the insecticoid warrior fought to remove its own bloodied, severed limb from its face, at least until Rayden was forced to dodge another sword swing from behind.  
The young man side-stepped a vertical chop that embedded the vicoid's blade in the ground, and then slashed heavily at the warrior's wrist, cutting it off and effectively disarming the creature.  
*Skrick!!* Rayden whirled around as one of the vicoids ahead chopped his sword down on his wounded companion's head, splitting the thick skull with the dull, stained metal.  
Rayden blinked as the dispatched creature began to fall, and then his eyes widened as it was smashed forward towards him.  
The boy's sword was knocked to the side as the heavy mass slammed into him, and then smashed him against the armored hide of the wounded vicoid to his rear, which staggered backward and then fell over from the force.  
Grunting miserably, Rayden started to shove the dead creature off of him, and then gasped in pain as sharp claws dug into his side. A large, plated hand made for his neck, and the young swordsman grabbed it firmly, holding it back just centimeters away from the weak flesh over his jugular.  
Grunting irritably, he ignored the other claw rending his side, and reached down for kodachi that he kept in a sheath tied to his thigh. Drawing it swiftly from its sheath, he flipped it around in his hand, and then stabbed up past his head, jamming it firmly into the base of the vicoid's jaw, just behind the mandibles.  
Feeling the claws at his side jerk to stop, Rayden shifted his feet under the vicoid corpse on top of him, and then launched it into the branches above, rolling off of the second corpse before one of the remaining warriors' blades could cut into him.  
On the other side of the dead vicoid, one of the uninjured warriors sustained his first blow in the battle as the companion that he had killed himself tumbled down on top of him.  
Rayden flipped to his feet, and then skipped back as a sword cut through the air that his torso had occupied a moment earlier.  
He jumped back again as his opponent stabbed forward, and then jumped up into the branches above. While the vicoids held an undisputed advantage while he didn't have his sword, they were still woefully slow and cumbersome.  
Seeing the distracted warrior shove the still-bleeding corpse off of him, Rayden jumped from his branch, landing a two-legged kick to the creature's chest. Deflecting off the stunned warrior, Rayden jumped for his sword, grabbing it and rolling on the ground before coming into a crouching position with his blade aimed to defend.  
The hurt vicoid rushed at him viciously, hissing death as strong, light swings came at the young swordsman in a chain of attacks that were blocked with firm precision as Rayden was slowly forced back to the treeline.  
*Clang!* The large sword left the flat of Rayden's blade before he could bat it away, and was raised high to crush the swordsman if he attempted a block.  
*Thunk* The weapon dug heavily into the dirt as Rayden ducked forward, raising his head between the vicoid's arms, and raising his sword for the vicoid's chin.  
*Shlak!* Unlike the kodachi, Rayden was unwilling to leave his sword embedded in an opponent's skull, and roughly pulled it out, splitting the skull clean open and spraying green fluids over the shattered forest floor.  
  
The last vicoid watched calmly as his final companion fell to his lifeless knees, and then collapsed forward onto the ground, his strangely tinted blood oozing onto the disturbed soil in a thick puddle.  
Rayden paid the slime at his feet no mind as it oozed around his boots, and brought his sword up to a ready position.  
{"You are the last one, creature. Now, will you tell me what I wish to know, or will you die pointlessly, like your friends?"}  
The surviving vicoid eyed the boy warily. So young, and rather small, and yet he nearly matched their strength? So vicious and merciless, and yet he spoke their language and was willing to spare him?  
{"Who are you? There are no humans in this land such as you."} Despite his hesitation in giving in to the boy's commands, the vicoid dropped his weapon on the ground in a show of surrender. His mission here was not one that he greatly favored, nor his commander one that he felt any particular loyalty to.  
Rayden frowned. {"I'm just a swordsman that happened to follow your little group. Now tell me, where is Doppler? What's he planning?"} He coughed slightly after he finished, and tugged on his collar a bit. Gaerieth was hard on a "normal" throat.  
The vicoid's mandibles clicked together lightly, betraying his interest. {"He went on ahead, to a temple near the village. He instructed three groups of warriors and a fourth group of mages that is coming later to make separate paths to it. He said he was going to open the Nexus, whatever that means."} The massive insecticoid shifted his shoulder plates backward in imitation of a shrug.  
Rayden narrowed his eyes. {"A Nexus?! Here? You are lying!"}  
The vicoid clicked his mandibles together again. {"I do not know what a Nexus is, but that is what he said we were going to activate. I'm afraid I have nothing to swear by that you would deem credible."} The vicoid shrugged once more, fairly unconcerned with how easily he could be killed, with his weapon on the ground.  
Rayden considered for a moment. These vicoids had been fairly unskilled and poorly fed grunts; he had fought stronger, well-trained ones, and barely emerged alive. If this was the quality of all of Doppler's troops, then he would have little trouble in dispatching them all and reaching the leader in good enough condition to fight.  
But the Nexus changed things. He had known that the demon lord hadn't used one to enter this land, which in itself seemed unusual, until he had confirmed that Earth had no stable trans-dimensional gateways. The introduction of a Nexus would produce a cluster of simple portals that could do little but harm the surrounding area, and possibly provide Doppler with extra troops.  
'But for what? What's he after?' {"What does he want with the Nexus? What is he doing?"}  
The vicoid clicked its mandibles together in irritation this time. {"I do not know. I do what I am told, and I am paid and fed. Is there anything else you wish of me, or can I go?"}  
Rayden snorted. {"Go back to where you came from."} The warrior creature turned away and walked down the trampled path, leaving his blade amidst the crushed leaves and twigs of the forest. Indeed, he had little need of it now.  
Rayden turned, and leapt into the trees. He could hear more creatures hacking through the forest nearer to the town road, and the edge of his senses detected a huge demonic aura a fair distance away. He would have to hurry.  
The hunt was on.  
__________________________________________________________________________________  
  
"Isn't this a fine place, Tio? So dark and mysterious, eh?" Doppler laughed lightly, parading across the rustic temple courtyard.  
His companion walked up to the center of the yard, his heavy, hoofed feet crushing the aged tile that covered the ground. "Such a powerful mana flow... this will work perfectly." Tio's race were known as devils, and while devils' body structures varied greatly due to the chaotic magic flowing through them, Tio himself boasted a fairly stereotypical form. He had a humanoid torso, with huge, muscular arms that had large, black bristles of hair over the forearms. His right hand, which commonly wielded one of the several weapons that he carried, was sheathed in a large metal gauntlet with a huge wrist guard that fanned out widely. A silvery chest plate protected his stomach but cut diagonally across his chest to his left shoulder, leaving the right shoulder area bare. The left shoulder had a huge guard on it with a spiked horn. The lower half of his body was formed like a satyr, with black-furred, reverse-joint legs leading down to giant split hooves. The armor for the lower half of Tio's body was more elaborate, with sharp, well-fitting silver armor plates that covered the top of his thighs and calves, with spiked cap plates over his knees and hooves. The devil's entire body was a light blue, with black stripes that flowed over his skin at in irregular intervals.  
Tio's face, which had a huge lower jaw with two large tusks jutting up, twisted into a frown. "The others should have been here by now. What's taking them so long?"  
Doppler shrugged. Unlike Tio, who was a good 8 feet tall, Doppler was roughly 5' 6". Also unlike Tio, Doppler looked human. He had short, shiny black hair that was tied back into a ponytail that reached the middle of his back, and wore a green jacket that was beautifully embroidered with golden Aztec-like drawings of fire-breathing monsters and other designs. Over that he had on a dark green cape, the edges of which seemed to be constantly fading in and out of the shadows, as if on the verge of just drying up into thin air.  
Well, he looked almost human, anyway. He did have four arms, rather than the more common single pair.  
All four were currently folded across his chest as he shrugged indifferently. "Any who do not make it here within the allotted time risk being destroyed. It's their problem, not mine."  
Doppler turned towards the center of the courtyard, which presented a fire pit roughly two meters in radius. The pit was currently unlit, with dark, burnt-out coals settled peacefully in the blackened metal dish.  
"It's time we began." The demon lord spread his hands apart, and then clasped his lower two together as if in prayer. "Tio, place the amplifier in the dish."  
The devil reached for the pouch hanging off his spiked belt, and slowly withdrew a crystal sphere just smaller than a human fist.  
The moment it left the protection of the pouch, the sphere flared with light, and began glowing fiercely.  
In response, the air in the courtyard seemed to waver and distort mightily, and shining white pinnacles of light began to flow from the ground all around the two demons. Small beams began rising from the dish and into the night sky, and the magical flows began building until a single fluid river of magical energy flowed upward from the charred plate.  
Doppler took a deep breath, smiling. "Perfect! This will work beautifully!"  
Tio gently placed the crystal globe into the dish, settling it atop the ashes of countless years' worth of fires. He backed away quickly, his giant hooves cracking and grinding the old tile below him.  
The river of white light intensified, becoming much thicker and brighter. After a moment, a dull whine could be heard throughout the temple grounds as the amplifier reached it full output potential.  
Doppler nodded his head sharply, and his upper pair of arms drew close together, a white sphere of light slowly collecting and growing between them.  
"Oley no cha gorei doh raigh nawoh..." The demon lord seemed to fall into a trance with his chants, and the light built to a certain point before the sphere spontaneously shot out of Doppler's hand, zig-zagging in the air wildly. After several seconds of aimless darting, the sphere blasted down into a point on the ground, leaving a white patch of energy on impact, which itself quickly faded away.  
Doppler continued chanting, another sphere forming between his hands.  
Tio quickly lost interested in the arcane rituals of higher magic, and turned to look at the temple. It was well designed, and its laborers must have toiled for quite some time to construct it. It resembled an old Aztec pyramid, with a square base and a flat top. On each corner of the large base a tall stone spire stood, each with a lantern mounted on top that glowed easily without the aid of any fire or electricity. Doubtlessly magical in nature. Tio wondered if any of the villagers ever wondered about them. These humans seemed woefully ignorant of such things.  
*Tak* *Tak* *Tak!*  
Tio turned around slowly as the sharp sound of nails on stone came closer, ready to reprimand whatever creature was approaching for taking so long to arrive.  
When he got a good look at the vicoid that had walked up to the temple courtyard, the devil's large, yellow eyes blinked. The creature was missing both its weapon, and strangely enough, the wrist that was supposed to be connected to the hand which was supposed to hold the weapon. It had two large gashes in its thick chest plate, and the green fluids that flowed through the monster's insecticoid body were currently running down its leg from a nasty-looking cut on its thigh.  
{"Report! What happened to you?! Where are the others?!"} Tio barked. A glance back at Doppler confirmed that his master was still going about his ritual. Not necessarily unaware of the vicoid or its condition, but unconcerned, at least.  
The vicoid slowly stared up at Tio, and the devil squinted a bit as he noticed that the creature's compound eyes were fogged up, indicating how close to death it was.  
The vicoid flexed its mandibles in preparation to speak.  
*Shyaak!* A sword slash smashed the hapless warrior aside, spraying the green blood into the air.  
Tio raised an eyebrow as Rayden glared at him. The boy had been positioned right behind the vicoid, and Tio had to admit that he was impressed that he had not detected anything of the sort at first.  
Under the partial coat of green slime, Rayden's blade glinted in the full moonlight, glowing ever so softly with a hint of blue energy.  
The devil snorted and stood up to his full height, the gentle lights flowing around him like a reversed snowfall. Very quickly that changed, and the lights began swirling violently about the devil like a tornado before swarming in and absorbing into him.  
Rayden remained in a guard position. Tio noticed, with no small measure of fascination, that the vicoid's blood that had wet the blade was actually sticking to the sword rather than running off. In fact, the ooze seemed to be shrinking along the blade's edge, almost as if the sword was absorbing it...  
"I thought someone would come. So it's you again, eh?" Tio started suddenly as Doppler spoke, and turned to look at his master.  
While the demon lord had ceased chanting, his hand were still practicing the same motions as before; his lower pair were pressed flat together, and his upper pair was still forming magic globes that would shoot around in seemingly random patterns before being absorbed into the ground.  
Rayden's eyes narrowed. "Yeah, it's me. May I ask just what you're doing?"  
Doppler smiled broadly, and continued with his motions even as his head turned to face the young swordsman. "You've done very good. For someone so young, anyway. You dispatched all the groups converging on the temple?"  
Rayden nodded slowly. It wasn't actually true, as he had not taken the time to locate the group that was to come later, but this guy didn't need to know that.  
Doppler nodded. "Ah, yes. You're a fine young fighter. But you should really know your limitations. You can't face me, little boy. And as much as you've tried to hinder and stop me in the last few months, you've done little but amuse me."  
"Well that changes now!" Rayden shouted, and shifted his position. "Tell me what you're up to, worm!"  
Doppler laughed. "But of course! It's the appropriate thing to do, correct? You see, this temple was constructed quite a long time ago to seal an ancient Nexus. You know what a Nexus is, correct?"  
Rayden remained silent, always keeping one eye on Doppler's large companion. He knew very well how easily a devil could dispatch him if it had the chance.  
Doppler rolled his eyes and sighed. "A Nexus is a practically indestructible crystal formation that is constructed over a force point, which is of course the point at which magical energy is expelled from the mana flows beneath the ground and into the atmosphere, creating a super-saturation of magical energy. These crystals permanently direct the mana into the form of complex and powerful spells. Namely, those required to rend the fabric of reality and allow free passage into other dimensions. A Nexus is, essentially, a cluster of stable dimensional portals." Doppler's lower two hands spread apart slightly, and then he touched the thumbs and forefingers of those hands together. "What I'm going to do is break the seal that this temple places on the Nexus, reform it, and open the gateways. Then I'm going to activate a beacon which will attract every creature of significant magical empathy that's close enough to the portals on the other side."  
Doppler stopped talking and chuckled a bit. "And there are some VERY nasty planes attached to this particular Nexus."  
"Why?!" Rayden growled, "What is all this for? Just to see this place get trashed?"  
Doppler's smile disappeared, and he shrugged. "What difference does it make to you?" He gave the boy a somber look. "It's a shame how your kind always ends up turning out. It really is. You could have made something of yourself, had you chosen a different path. But I'm afraid that, outside of romantic stories told at human bedsides to reassure children, demon hunters don't survive long enough to make anything of themselves." Doppler sighed once more. "I had high hopes for your species once. Hybrids held so much potential, and were such interesting creatures. But I'm afraid that the sheer ARROGANCE you creatures have is simply insufferable. Tio, feel free to play with him before you kill him. And fetch his sword when you're done."  
Tio raised an eyebrow at the exchange. Hybrid? The boy looked completely human. Of course, he had just wiped out more than a dozen opponents, and there was some kind of aura about him that distorted the magical flows that the amplifier had rendered visible, so it was a definite possibility.  
  
The young swordsman had had enough. Recognizing that the devil was the more active target, Rayden dashed towards it, slashing fiercely in an attack at the creature's unarmored thigh.  
Suddenly Tio's image became faded, and several afterimages flashed around Rayden as the demon strafed to the side at high speed. Bringing his blade up in a general block, Rayden was knocked to the side as a massive strike impacted his sword, throwing up sparks from the impact.  
Tio raised an eyebrow as the boy stumbled slightly, then regained his senses slowly. A glance at his gauntlet revealed a small nick in it, while the sword was clearly unscathed.  
"Amusing... your senses serve you well. It's a pity to waste such skill." The devil chuckled a bit, and then withdrew a large weapon from its back. It resembled a huge, razor-edged boomerang, except that the top section being noticeably larger than the bottom section, which Tio grasped with his armored hand. "However, I have a job to do."  
Rayden didn't waste any words. He lunged forward, slashing downward. Tio retaliated with a massive sweep of his weapon, which the young swordsman deflected quickly, turning on the defensive once more.  
Suddenly, Tio's speed magic kicked in again, and Rayden's sword was battered aside as he barely deflected a powerfully driven blow.  
With his defenses down, however, there was nothing to stop the next attack.  
*Kshak!* Blood sprayed thinly across the now-glowing courtyard as Rayden's chest was cut open in a long diagonal line. The boy gasped fiercely, and staggered backward as his life began oozing out of him.  
Tio grinned. 'That blow should have cut him in two, easily. Fascinating.'  
Finally gathering his bearings, Rayden closed his eyes and charged forward blindly, knowing that he had already lost. The demon's power was simply too great, and the swordsman had lost his bearings too early in the battle. Bringing his sword to bear, he stabbed it forward, only to grunt miserably as it was slammed down into the courtyard ground by Tio's angled sword.  
The huge devil reached forward, and grasped Rayden by the neck, squeezing firmly. "Master, are you certain you don't wish to keep this one? He'll make an excellent laborer, if nothing else. Pitiful waste of a potential slave."  
Doppler rolled his eyes. "Tio, Tio, Tio. Still inexperienced and naive after 3,500 years. You can't leave these types alive, or else they escape, grow in power, and then come back to get you for revenge and ruin your carefully laid plans at the last minute. It's really quite messy, trust me."  
Tio blinked, then shrugged, applying more pressure to Rayden's neck. The boy was currently kicking and punching him desperately, and it was actually starting to hurt.  
"Very well, you're the bo-" *Blam!!* Tio was suddenly blasted onto the ground as a white ki bolt slammed into his back, and Rayden was inadvertently flung onto the ground, where he landed heavily within convenient reach of his broadsword.  
The boy looked up groggily, having only recently recovered his breathing. Standing at the edge of the courtyard was a fairly old man, maybe in his 60's, wearing a monk's robe.  
Tio got up unsteadily, growling outrageously. "You DARE?!"  
The old martial artist faced him calmly. "Begone demon, you have no place here. Leave now, before I decide to punish your desecration of this temple." He turned a surprisingly kind smile on the boy. "And you had better leave too. You've fought well, but this conflict is beyond you now."  
A red-black aura began to form around Tio as he fed energy into it, and the demon stepped forward menacingly.  
"And to whom do we owe the displeasure of this irritation?" Doppler said wryly, stopping Tio in his tracks. Though his upper pair of arms were glowing brightly and being held to the sky, his lower ones were crossed in annoyance.  
"I refuse to have my name sullied by your dark tongue, creature!" The old man shouted defiantly, "I will warn you once more! Leave this holy place at once! A great power lies here, and-"  
Doppler snorted, cutting off the martial arts master. "How rude! I'll just have you know that I know far more about this power than you, human, and soon, I will awaken it. That which you deem 'holy', will soon rain destruction upon your worthless civilization!" Doppler's eyes glowed a dull gold as he spoke, hiding his irises and pupils for a moment.  
The martial artist calmly assumed an offensive stance. "I will not allow you to complete that spell, monster!"  
Doppler chortled. "Spell? You mean, this spell?" Suddenly, the demonic sorcerer threw his upper hands apart, and twin tendrils of magical energy shot out of his hands and blasted into the ground. Once settled atop the crumbling tile, the beams speed about its surface, leaving a trail of white energy behind them that traced a huge figure onto the grounds of the temple.  
The martial arts master gaped, his eyes trembling. "You... you didn't! Are you mad? You can't unseal the temple!"  
Doppler blinked. "Unseal the temple? No, no, that was a beacon to attract monsters. THIS is the spell to break the seal." With that, Doppler simply jabbed two fingers of his upper right hand at the ancient structure.  
*KRAK-KROOOM!!!* A black lightning bolt lanced down and split the magical shrine at the center, causing ribbons of dark energy to branch out in all directions.  
As the ribbons reached the spires about the base, each lantern began to glow brighter, and then flicker fiercely before exploding in a massive shower of bright lights and blackened rubble.  
Rayden and the old man watched in horror as a huge, towering crystal shard burst from the Earth right under the temple, splitting the main structure apart completely and showering rock and debris around the courtyard. Several more huge towers followed that one, each shaking the ground with noise as the sharpened spires reached for the sky.  
'Damn it! No!' Rayden recovered his blade, and then staggered away, holding his blood-soaked shirt to his chest as he hobbled into the woods. He was outmatched before, and things were about to get a whole lot worse.  
Turning to the old man, he shouted a warning as best he could, finding himself short of breath. "Run away! Now! While you still can! It's over now!"  
Tio stood defiantly between the martial artist and Doppler, awaiting the old man's move. He didn't look like he'd be much of a challenge, but then, that energy missile had HURT.  
The man chose to ignore the swordsman's warnings, and moved to engage the devil. "Prepare yourself creature! You won't get away with this!"  
  
As the two mighty foes engaged each other, huge ellipses of swirling colors began forming at the base of the smaller crystal spires, collecting from the free-floating mana.  
Even as smaller crystals began forming around the portal bases, the magical gateways began to shimmer and distort, announcing the presence of inter-planar travelers.  
Doppler smiled, even as he watched Rayden stumble into the forest, cursing to himself. Too bad really. He would have liked to get his hands on that sword for study, but casting such a powerful and complex beacon had left him tired enough that he didn't want to expend any more energy unless he had to.  
"The Nexus has opened... it has begun." Chuckling madly to himself, Doppler turned away and looked to the glowing moon as the first blazing demon stepped into the world of human civilization, ready for oblivion.  
__________________________________________________________________________________  
  
Most people thought that of Ranma as an unusually heavy sleeper.  
Of course, when you're jarred awake every morning by being thrown into something, lesser disturbances do tend to seem far more trivial, after a time.  
Nonetheless, at ten years old, Ranma's martial senses had been well enough developed so that his subconscious mind could tell the difference between a valid threat to his life, which required conscious action, and just another dolt trying to get him out of bed, which did not.  
Ironically, had he been awake, the light scuttling sound that came from the forest may not have demanded the same attention. But with his danger sense on full vulnerability alert, the young martial artist was yanked from a sound sleep to awake and panicking in a matter of seconds.  
Ranma looked around frantically for a moment, and then blinked before focusing on a black form that slowly emerged from the forest, the meager light from the dying fire shining off its gleaming carapace.  
Understandably, Ranma first questioned whether he was still asleep or not. After all, a 4-foot tall black spider with oversized, dripping fangs seemed the stuff of nightmares, not reality.  
A high-pitched hiss emanated from the creature, and it slowly raised up its front pair of legs. As it did so, Ranma could see that the front pair had edges on the pointed segment, like a blade.  
"Hey Pop? Pop!" Ranma asked, standing up slowly.  
A grunt was heard from across the camp site. "What do you want boy? It's late. *Yawn*"  
Ranma pointed at the monstrosity, not taking his eyes off of it to look at his father. "What kind of spider is that?"  
Genma growled, and slowly shook the sleep from his eyes as he prepared to chastise his son.  
"Stupid boy! You wake me up in the middle of the night to ask about a spi-WHOAH!!!" Genma's eyes widened as he caught sight of the hideous shape, and was immediately frozen into inaction from the image.  
The shiny black eyes of the giant spider, a deathcrawler as it was commonly known as, swiftly took in the potential prey before it. The little one would be easy and quick to disable, while the older one would struggle, and probably have to be eaten on the spot. The little one would be bitten first, and the bigger one would be devoured as the child's insides melted away to goo. The decision was made. The deathcrawler lunged.  
Ranma shouted out in surprise as one of the bladed legs stabbed at him, and he dodged to the side. Having never fought a gigantic spider before, he didn't realize that he had inadvertently placed himself in a perfect position to be bitten by his arachnid opponent. The deathcrawler rammed its head forward, slamming Ranma to the ground and positioning itself over him for a quick injection of venom.  
Ranma wasn't going to go down so easily, however, and slammed his knees up into the spider's thorax, watching uneasily as the sharp fangs stabbed down just short of his chest. As the spider struggled for the leverage to disable its prey, Ranma shifted his legs, and then kicked the massive arachnid off of him and into the trees surrounding the clearing.  
Genma watched all of this, completely stunned. When he saw the deathcrawler struggling to disentangle its legs from the multitude of branches it was caught in however, he got his mind in gear. "Ranma! Come here! Get away from that thing!" Genma grabbed his backpack that was next to the tree he was sleeping on, and stuck his hand into it as Ranma scurried up to him.  
Finding what he was looking for, Genma withdrew a large combat knife from the pack. Martial arts was all well and good, and Genma preferred hand-to-hand to using weapons anyway, but there was no way he was getting close to that thing if he could help it!  
The deathcrawler shook itself mightily as it got free of the foliage, being totally unprepared as it was to take that kind of attack. Unfortunately (for the creature), it only got time to glance at its escaped prey before one of its eyes was suddenly blinded, and a searing pain blasted through its head as its life quickly seeped away.  
  
Ranma watched, fascinated, as the monster thrashed about wildly with the knife embedded in its head, before finally crumpling to the ground in pool of dark fluids.  
Genma breathed a great sigh of relief, and then nervously looked about at the forest surrounding the clearing. Nobody had said anything about this forest being infested by giant spiders!  
Ranma was less interested in that, however, and gasped when he looked up above the treeline. There was a powerful glow coming from the direction of the town, and it vaguely illuminated the tendrils of smoke that came from the same area.  
Without another word, Ranma ran for the cliff that overlooked the town, ignoring his father as he told him to stop.  
  
After a few short moments he was there, and Ranma stared in disbelief at what he saw.  
Everywhere he looked, there was destruction. Rows of houses were ablaze. A few of them, scattered here and there, were frozen solid, spikes of ice jutting out of windows and roofs. Bodies littered the streets, most of them human, but with the occasional charred or trampled form that seemed unnatural to Ranma's eyes.  
"Shrreeeeiak!!" A large winged creature, with four large, clawed feet swept through the air, followed by two more, and dive-bombed into a house, blowing out the wall in a shower of splintered wood and stone.  
"Boy, what are you-..." Genma stopped as he caught sight of the town, and hesitantly stepped up beside his son.  
Ranma's jaw trembled slightly as he heard the screams and fighting coming from within the infiltrated house, somehow managing to rise above the din of flames and more distant screams coming from the town area in general.  
Within moments, the three winged beasts sauntered out of the hole they had made in the once-pristine home, their toothy maws and vicious claws all wet with blood and torn flesh.  
Genma gulped loudly, and then turned suddenly as a fiery explosion burst upward from a different part of the town. From his vantage point, he could see a large, squat creature strolling through the streets, its two gargantuan hands ablaze. It's body was charcoal black, with red, glowing veins that ran sharply through it, giving the demon a distinctly "volcano-ish" look.  
Abruptly, Ranma turned toward his father. "Pop! We gotta do something!"  
Genma looked at his son like he was some kind of idiot. "Are you crazy boy? We have to-" Genma stopped himself, then took a deep breath. "Ranma, at times, a martial artist must choose flight over fight. Two flaming corpses aren't going to help anyone!" Genma smirked slightly when he was finished, glad that he had thought of that last part. Better to look modest and smart than scared out of his wits. "Come on boy, we're leaving through the forest."  
Ranma frowned, wondering if this latest bit of "wisdom" was an actual lesson, or just an excuse for not getting into danger. "But aren't there giant spiders in the forest?"  
Ever so slowly, a large sweatdrop rolled down Genma's head. He had forgotten about those. Genma had been training in the wilderness long enough to know the hunting habits of spiders; they could lay in wait in absolute silence, and then spring on prey without any warning. It would be almost impossible to tell the black arachnids' hides from the rest of the foliage in the dead of night, and if either of them got bitten, even once...  
"Of course, as martial artists, we can't just ignore something like this, now can we? Come on boy, and stay near me!" Better to face the enemy you could see rather than the enemy you couldn't, after all.  
__________________________________________________________________________________  
  
Although, technically, the decision NOT to enter the woods was actually one of the smarter ones Genma had made (the deathcrawlers preferred that terrain, and there were nastier types out there), less than two minutes after the two Saotomes descended the cliff, Genma was cursing his son for talking him into this.  
"Look out boy!"  
Ranma tossed himself to the side, and another of the winged beasts from before slammed into the ground hard, missing its prey as it dove into the hard-packed dirt. Genma stopped running for a moment to kick it as hard as he could, slamming the monster into the wall of a nearby home, and dazing it much more severely.  
Ranma rolled to his feet, and then his eyes widened. "Pop! Behind you!"  
Genma blinked, then tossed himself to the side, barely avoiding a shimmering blue spark that shot past him, and into the center of the street.  
*K-SHAAAK!!* Huge spikes of ice shot up where the bolt impacted, stabbing outward and then settling into a beautiful needle tower formation, with sheets of ice slowly spreading around the base.  
Of course, none of the humans present were stupid enough to stop and admire the ice explosion as opposed to the creature that threw it.  
Genma's left eye twitched as he beheld a vaguely humanoid torso floating in the air, made entire of ice. Wherever the normal, soft curve a human's body should be, there was a sharp angle, and where a human's waist expanded over the pelvis, the demon's body simply narrowed down to a jagged spike that hovered a foot off the ground.  
The monster hissed fiercely, and sparkly mist blasted out of its mouth.  
  
Ranma didn't have as good a view of the creature, as Genma's dodge had almost placed his tender little body on an unusually sharp-looking ice needle. Getting up quickly, Ranma scanned every direction for danger before he was to try and assist his father.  
It was a good thing Ranma remembered to include "up" in the possible vectors of enemy attack, or else he would have doubtlessly become shredded meat. Diving forward, Ranma watched as yet another of the winged monstrosities plowed into the ground behind him.  
Unfortunately for the monster, its tumbling and rolling didn't stop before it reached the deadly spire in the center of the road. Blood gushed outward onto the dirt path as the creature was cleanly impaled, the ice spikes shattered against its weight even as they pierced its hardened hide.  
Ranma stared, wide-eyed at the bloody mass that now decorated the fragile, looking structure. Then he pointed at it.  
"Ha ha! Stupid monster!" Ranma didn't get to celebrate long before the cracking sound of another ice bolt pierced the night air, and he heard his father yell out in surprise from behind one of the houses on the other side of the street.  
*KA-KRAACH!!!* The house he was standing in front of exploded outward without warning, and Ranma barely managed to throw himself heavily to the side as a gigantic, bony scythe stabbed down into the ground where he had stood just a moment ago.  
Ranma's eyes were really starting to complain about all the incredulous staring they had done that day. Standing before him was a truly massive beast, 16 feet tall and covered in a thick, shining armored carapace. It had legs like a spider, except that it only possessed four of them, and they were horribly malformed into gigantic, bony, bladed spikes. Its well-protected body hung between the huge supports, ending in a large beak at the head, which was complemented by a pair of oversize mandibles that looked like it could crush large boulders with ease.  
Ranma gulped as the creature gazed at him through deep eyeholes set in its armored skull, and then scrambled away as the beast turned its beak toward him.  
"This suuuuuuucks!!" Ranma yelled as he began sprinting away, all too aware of the heavy pounding that the monster made as it began to give chase.  
  
Ranma turned a corner as he ran for his life, and immediately leapt as he saw one of the black-red fire creatures from before stop in front of him, startled. Not one to be so easily distracted when his life was at stake, Ranma landed behind the fire demon and kept running, still aware of the pounding of bony scythes into the ground behind him.  
The demon turned to go after the human that had surprised it, and did not heed the sound of its massive companion monster's trajectory until it was too late.  
*Crunch!!* *SMASH!!!* *Crack!!*  
"Ha ha! Stupid monster!" Ranma ran backwards for a short stint so that he could point to the trampled mess and laugh, and then quickly turned forward again as his concentration shifted back to preserving his life.  
With the minor obstacle of a rather large roadblock (one that struggled as it was being plowed over) and an extra burst of speed on Ranma's part, the massive beast lost sight of its prey as it stumbled out of the alley and onto another main road..  
Digging its scythe-like legs into the dirt to kill its momentum, the monster looked at the wall of houses in front of it, and then down the roads to its left and to its right. Most of the homes here had been ransacked already, though they hadn't been burned down or completely gutted like much of the rest of the town.  
With a disgruntled snort, one that blasted a fair amount of dirt around under its beak, the beast chose a street at random, lumbering along and looking for less nimble food.  
  
Ranma breathed heavily as he peeked around the door to the small farmhouse he had ducked into, deliberately ignoring the shredded walls and bloodstains that decorated the interior. Ranma was a martial artist, not a real warrior, and quite frankly, the brutal displays he had seen in the town scared the hell out of him. Luckily, or perhaps not, Genma's constant drilling that fear was a weakness not to be displayed helped him significantly in just pretending like the only thing out of place was the giant monstrosities lumbering about the town.  
Gently closing the door, and then blockading it with a table (as if a fairly light chunk of wood could stop any of the attacking creatures), Ranma wiped some sweat from his forehead, then snuck cautiously into the house.  
The first room he investigated was, unfortunately, the kitchen. Unfortunate, because it was apparent that one of the house's occupants had been struck down here.  
Ranma fought to contain the bile rising to his throat. Whatever had invaded this place had eaten most of its catch, but had been messy enough about it for Ranma to tell that the woman (if the scraps of apron around the bloodied bones were any indication) had been caught, slaughtered, and devoured on the spot.  
At least, he HOPED these things had slaughtered her first.  
A sudden banging noise from another part of the house snatched away his attention, and Ranma ran out of the kitchen, glad to get away from such a scene.  
Walking stealthily along the hallway, Ranma grimaced at what he saw.  
Another deathcrawler, just like the one that had attacked the camp, was positioned against a hall closet, with its bladed front legs digging into the door, which had several other deep gouges in it. It was also quite dead, as its abdomen and lower thorax had been crushed, and the liquids within were now spilling all over the floor. It didn't look like a calculated strike, and Ranma suspected it had simply been stepped on (the trails of damage high on the walls and ceiling seemed to support this theory).  
Licking his lips gingerly, Ranma poked the spider corpse with his foot, watching it move dryly from the force. Yes, it was dead all right.  
Ranma grabbed the head of the beast and yanked it from the door, shoving it back onto the opposite wall of the hallway. Then, dusting off his hands, he cautiously reached for the knob, and slowly turned it...  
"Hyah!"  
Prepared as he was for an attack, Ranma was able to duck under the flying kick that erupted from the closet and skip to the side, turning around to get a good view of his attacker.  
He hadn't expected the attacker to be a girl, however, and the girl hadn't expected her attack to be so effectively avoided. Trying to change her position to land, she crossed the limited width of the hallway easily, and found her impact cushioned, for better or for worse, by a dry, lifeless exoskeleton.  
"Hey, you're human! Great! Look, we gotta get out of here!" Ranma frowned. "Hey, are you listening?"  
The girl, in fact, wasn't listening, as she found herself staring up into a pair of large, needle-sharp fangs, and surrounded by large, dry legs that had curled up around her by the force and point of impact on the dead husk's exoskeleton. Really, she was hardly in a position to even tell it was dead.  
"AAAAAAAAAH!!! GET IT OFF ME!!! GET IT OFF ME!!!" Jumping off the silent corpse, the girl began to thrash about wildly and run around in circles about hallway.  
Ranma sweatdropped. 'Leave it to a girl to get so worked up about something like a dead, giant, man-eating spider.'  
"N-Natsume? What's going on?" Ranma blinked and turned toward the closet as he heard another voice, and saw a slightly younger girl opening the door, though she was in a ready stance.  
When she saw the dead spider, her eyes widened, and she completely dropped her guard in shock, gaping.  
Ranma rolled his eyes. "Don't worry, it's dead. Has been for a while now, I think."  
The other girl, Natsume apparently, had finished running about at random, and had settled for standing in the middle of the hallway and hugging herself while shuddering violently. She looked to be about his age, maybe a little older, and had dark brown hair that was tied into a ponytail atop the back of her head. The other girl's hair was a little lighter in shade and was cut fairly short, as well as being held together with a red ribbon atop her head.  
"So..." Ranma began, scratching the back of his head, "is this your house?"  
Natsume cast a last, uneasy glance at the dead arachnid, and then gathered her courage and determination together as she faced Ranma. "No, we're travelers. My name is Natsume and this is my sister, Kurumi. The couple that lives in this house was kind enough to feed and shelter us for the night. Who are you, and just what is going on here?"  
Ranma had to admit, the girl had gone from freaked-out and panicked to cool and collected in an impressive amount of time. "Name's Ranma Saotome. As for what's happening, I'm not really sure why, but the short of it is, this village is being attacked and burnt down by a bunch of monsters. Me and my pop had a camp nearby, and we came to try and get as many people out of here as we could."  
Kurumi blinked. "Monsters?" Her gaze inevitably found its way back to the insensate spider against the wall, and she gulped.  
Natsume frowned. "Well, that explains what all that noise was, and why nobody came to get us..." she looked up at Ranma. "The woman told us to get into the closet, and her husband had gone out to investigate a fire on the edge of the village." She bit her lip pensively. "Do you suppose they're all right?"  
Ranma's face darkened, and he felt his mouth go dry. "Uh... well... no. I'm sorry."  
There was dead silence in the hall for a moment, and Natsume and Kurumi both found themselves staring at the floor.  
*Ka-thoooom!!* A wave of heat rushed through the house, and all three children were knocked off their feet as the structure groaned from the force of a nearby explosion.  
Ranma made a disgusted noise as he wiped some of the deathcrawler's body fluids off of his arms. "Well, I'm sure we're all sad that the lady died, but we'd better get outta here if we don't want to join her!" Ranma wasted no more time, running for the back of the house (away from the recent explosion). The two wandering sisters followed wordlessly.  
  
Ranma gently opened the door to the barn in the rear of the house, being just as cautious as he had been in the hallway. This time his guard was not tested, and Ranma began scanning the empty barnyard for signs of danger.  
Being sure to check the rafters and roof, Ranma gestured for Natsume and Kurumi to follow, and then darted out into the center of the barn, keeping up a wary defense.  
Natsume stared emotionlessly at the fields that could be seen through the open doors of the back of the barn. The rows of grape vines and small patches of other vegetables were torn and ravaged, and a few craters dotted a vague line through the fields, giving the impression of a large creature simply blowing up a path for himself through the harvest.  
Ranma gestured the two girls forward. "Okay, I think it's-"  
*Crack!* *Fwooosh!* A wave of fire blasted into the side of the barn, and Ranma hopped back as small bits of stored hay and splinters of old woods sprinkled down from the rafters above.  
A small trail of fire snaked out from one side of the barn, and then Ranma saw a large, armored hoof drop before the entrance.  
Tio made his way alongside the barn, and then glanced to the side as he caught sight of something moving.  
He snorted. Three children were backing away from the large doorway, each of them positioned as if they meant to defend themselves from him. How amusing.  
Still, Tio was neither sadistic nor particularly bloodthirsty, and turned away.  
Ranma gulped as he looked over the intimidating figure of the devil, and wondered if he should wait, or risk going out the other side. Then he noticed something on the other side of the devil. In his left hand, the hand that he couldn't see easily from his current perspective, was a bloody, human corpse. Male or female, he couldn't tell, but it was wearing a monk's robe, and was obviously dead.  
His indecision stiffened as another creature hovered slowly into view. The ice demon.  
Natsume watched Ranma carefully, debating whether or not to leave the boy and run the other way , or stick with him and trust that he wouldn't lead them all to their deaths. The creature that had just appeared looked to be made entirely of ice, and had a pair of broken glasses grasped in a fist of bloodied claws. It paid the three children no mind, and slowly floated up to the blue demon in armor before speaking in a slow and almost melodic language.  
"Jarmoon yrall no rute yhetell," the demon's voice was so smooth and fluid, there was some question as to whether it had come from the creature's mouth at all.  
As Tio responded to the question in an equally incomprehensible manner, Ranma's eyes were locked on the pair of glasses gripped firmly within the ice creature's talons.  
'It... It can't be! He can't be...' Ranma denied it with all his strength, even as he slowly backed away from the exchange going on between the two demons. However, there was little denying it. Those were undoubtedly Genma's glasses, and he really doubted the crimson liquid scattered over the monster's claws was its own blood, if such a being even had any.  
  
{"You have your orders. Branch out immediately toward the nearest villages, and let them do as they please, so long as they keep moving."}  
The empty, glowing blue lights that floated in the hollows of the demon's skull of ice flashed. {"What of the defenders, lord? Should we organize to breach their defenses?"}  
Tio laughed deeply. {"There are no defenses. Not as of yet, at least. Cut down anyone who stands in your way. Lord Doppler cares nothing for these people, so do with them as you wish."}  
Ever so slowly, the ice demon turned its mysterious gaze on the three children, who paled and prepared themselves to flee, looking for the best escape routes.  
{"Should we not purge them? They might alert others."}  
Tio glanced at the children apathetically. {"And who are they going to warn?"} He waved his gauntleted hand in the air, dismissing them. {"Leave them to the racids. They prefer live prey, anyway. We have more important things to do."}  
  
"Yra shrikniel racid dioy nu somha upu no ka," the blue devil spoke gruffly, waving his hand.  
The ice demon nodded slightly, then floated off. As it left, it finally released its hold on the bloodied glasses, as if it had been given something far more important to worry about.  
Tio likewise left, walking briskly toward where he came. Neither creature gave the slightest regard to the children at all.  
And thus Ranma had to physically restrain himself from lunging out at the hundred-and-one openings that the ice demon left as it floated away. He was strong and skilled; heck, he could take down an average guy twice his age without breaking a sweat, but could he take out a demon? Could he even HURT a creature made of ice, and not flesh? Hell, how was that even possible? Where would he hit it? If he broke it, would it die?  
Natsume watched Tio's back as she peeked out of the barn. "Okay, I think it's safe now. We can make a break for the forest road from here, and..." she trailed off as she turned, and witnessed Ranma gently picking up the crushed wire-frame glasses from the ground, a single tear rolling down his cheek.  
Kurumi leaned down next to him, her expression solemn. "I'm sorry... you knew the person who wore those?"  
Ranma wiped the tear away violently, and Kurumi flinched back a bit. "He... he was... he was my dad... and my teacher..." Ranma grit his teeth and stood up. Dammit, he would not cry! His father had just died, and he was NOT going to disgrace the man's memory by crying like a girl!  
Ranma blinked as best he could, and set his eyes on a narrow road into the forest that Natsume was glancing at. "Let's get out of here. Before we lose anything else."  
  
It was the first town of many. The small, unnamed village in the forest regions of Japan had been subjected to a mass slaughter, a chaotic swarm of destruction and terror that left few certain of exactly what had happened, provided they had even lived through the experience.  
Other towns would meet more spectacular ends. Nioshi was cooked like an oven, clouds of fire set on each border, the entire town going up in a massive firestorm. Kioshatika was hammered with magical ice, and in less than an hour, the entire village was carpeted with huge ice needle formations, every street and house sparkling as spilled blood froze in thin rivers.  
But there was more to come. So much more.  
The Death March had begun.  
__________________________________________________________________________________  
  
Mysterious Sightings and Massacres in Country Regions Astound Authorities  
"Numerous reports of strange and malicious animals have begun coming in around the protected forests of Okinawa this last week. At first the sightings were dismissed as rumors and pranks that came up surrounding the recent upsurge in missing persons in the larger cities, as well as the loss of contact and travel in many of the smaller outlying villages. However, with the sheer number of reported sightings, some of which include some photogenic evidence, as well as the reported loss of several investigators and rangers in that region, officials have been forced to decide that there is a definite threat. Already surveillance equipment has recorded some 'unusual activity', as was vaguely explained to reporters. The government refused to elaborate on their findings, but assured the media that the situation would be swiftly contained, advising civilians to stay in their homes while larger task forces were assembled and deployed."  
- Japanese newspaper, 1997  
__________________________________________________________________________________  
  
Ranma swiftly scaled the stone wall before him, cursing his rotten luck with all the breath he could spare.  
Below him, two racids skidded to a halt, their thick tongues sliding over the jagged razor teeth set into their fierce looking beaks.  
At only two feet tall and four feet long, the racids weren't the most intimidating and dangerous of monsters by a long shot. They couldn't fly, use magic, dig through solid rock, or launch spikes spontaneously out of various parts of their body.  
Of course, had Ranma still held the perspective on wilderness predators that he had a year ago, he would have been scared silly of the blasted things. They were fast runners, very capable hunters, and, unfortunately, very able jumpers.  
"Shyaa!" The first racid bunched up its powerful back legs and leapt, ready to rend the small human with the four short, clawed forearms before delivering the finishing blow.  
*Smack!!* It didn't quite go as expected.  
Ranma watched, still clutching the wall, as the racid he kicked went flying into the mass of trees he had run out of, its body having a slight spin to it as it sailed away.  
*Wham!!* The meaty sound of metal-hard carapace slamming into a sturdy tree at 45 kilometers an hour sounded mighty satisfying to Ranma's ears, and the 11-year-old martial artist looked down at the other one.  
"So, you just gonna stand there, or are you gonna try your luck too?"  
The creature blinked up at him, then turned to its companion, who was lying on the ground, twitching. Then it looked up at Ranma again.  
Then it turned around and hopped away into the forest. There just HAD to be an easier meal around.  
Ranma snorted at the fleeing beast, and then finished climbing the rock wall. Upon reaching the top, he found a large grassy plateau that overlooked the village he was currently trying to escape from.  
Looking over the village, and coincidentally, the supernatural dark clouds that were currently raining lightning bolts on the dark village, Ranma sighed. Such spectacular sights were unfortunately becoming much more common, and what Japanese forces there were on Okinawa had been ordered to eliminate and contain the demonic threat, not so much protect the villages. The simple difficulty of either task, and the many additional complications of the latter were so astounding that Ranma could hardly blame them; the only two tank column he had witnessed in the area were annihilated from long range before they even got to a battlefield.  
The lightning stopped flashing, and the black clouds began to fade. At least most of the townspeople had gotten out of town before it was hit, thanks to his warning. The demons would be busy tearing apart the homes and eating any stored food for a while before they'd realize that the town was pretty much abandoned, giving the townspeople more time to escape.  
He idly wondered how Natsume and Kurumi were doing. After they'd escaped the initial push of monsters through the forests, they'd traveled together for a short while before Natsume had convinced him that they could make it on their own. Which actually suited him rather well, as he didn't really want to be traveling and training with girls. It had turned out that they were actually quite capable fighters, and Natsume had actually taught him a thing or two during their few sparring matches, but Genma's teachings seemed to echo even louder in his memory now that the old man was dead, and Ranma felt very uncomfortable traveling and fighting with the opposite sex.  
He wondered if they felt the same way about him. He wondered what their plans were for the future. He wondered where they'd have to go, with monsters swarming everywhere.  
He also wondered why there was a B-52 heavy bomber flying overhead.  
Ranma didn't know enough about planes to actually identify it as one, but he had been to a few airports, and knew that the passenger aircraft there didn't look like this one.  
They also didn't drop huge payloads of really big bombs, like this one just did.  
Ranma's eyes widened, and then closed, as the deafening explosions and powerful flashes of multiple firebombs peppered the desecrated town, throwing dirt and ash into the wind among the death screams of the malicious beasts below.  
Ranma lowered his hand from where it protected his eyes, and then blinked at the devastation.  
"Whoa... cool!" Sure, the town had been destroyed, and there was a slight chance that some moron had stayed behind and gotten pulverized just now, but at the same time, and whole lot of killing machines had just gotten busted up but good.  
Ranma was about to point and laugh at the shattered corpses within the raging firestorm that the town had become, when he noticed a number of shapes appear in the distance, shooting up from below the trees and taking flight. They had bodies like humans, but large, black, metallic wings that kept them easily aloft under the harshest flight conditions. Dark angels.  
Ranma's face darkened as four of the demons took off after the plane, magical bolts charging within their hands. Ranma turned the other way. He couldn't do anything now, but someday, he swore, there would be time when he wouldn't have to run. Someday.  
__________________________________________________________________________________  
  
North Korea Attacked!  
"Sightings of the first dispatches of demonic invaders reached the Korean government just two days ago, and was thus spread to the rest of the world within moments. The unaccounted-for explosion of the unnatural invaders continues to defy researchers and investigators, and a conventional counter-strike against the invading foreces seems less and less possible as ground forces and even aircraft are torn apart in the titanic battles across Japan. The apparent ability of the creatures to cross water to other land masses has a great many international leaders troubled as well. North Korea boasted of a quick end to the 'demon menace', and launched several nuclear weapons at their coast at 3 PM of yesterday, despite numerous projections of the potential harm to its citizens. Reporters do not have a clear analysis of the results, but the last transmission sent from the North Korean defense forces reported dark shapes penetrating the nuclear firestorm. North Korea has since appealed repeatedly for help and assistance in fighting off the invasion, only to receive mass refusals from the international community. Meanwhile, refugees continue to pour in past the South Korean border, which is heavily fortified with Chinese and U.S. forces. In an update on Japan, the government has all but abandoned the whole of their country, drawing in all resources and defenses to Tokyo, which has continued to hold by the lone virtue of heavy U.S. military support. It is not expected that Japan's capital will survive another week."  
- Chinese newspaper, 1998  
__________________________________________________________________________________  
  
"Here you go kid, just hit the safety, aim, and pull the trigger, all right?" The man loaded his own pistol and took aim at an imaginary target. "Heh, pretty stupid of them to hold onto all those anti-gun laws for so long, eh? Just stupid."  
Ranma ignored the man, fingering his own gun. He had seen these before, and been lectured on their danger, but had never touched one before. And now this man was expecting him to fire it?  
"Here they come!" *Blam!* *Blam!* *Blam!* *Blam!* *Blam!* *Blam!* *Blam!*  
Ranma joined the older man in firing at the approaching group of deathcrawlers, feeling a bit of a thrill as the giant arachnids jolted back, stunned, with each shot. Multiple bullets penetrated the hard exoskeleton easily, and after seven shots from the man and a full clip from Ranma, two of the beasts were dead.  
*Blam!* *Blam!* *Blam!* *Blam!* Unfortunately for the man, it was difficult to concentrate sufficient firepower to take out the rest. An angry hiss from a shot deathcrawler was the last sound he heard before twin bladed legs stabbed through his chest, and a second giant spider jumped onto his back and pierced it with its fangs, preparing itself for a full, refreshing meal.  
Ranma cursed the now-useless weapon in his hand, not having been given the crash course on how to reload (not that he had any spare bullets on him).  
He dodged the initial stab that was intended to pierce him like it had his companion, and ducked under the twin death scythes before punching the deathcrawler straight in its biggest eye, right in the center of its forehead. As it flinched back from the blow, Ranma flipped the gun in his hand so that he was holding it upside-down, then crammed it into the injured eye, breaking the surprisingly firm membrane and also getting yucky stuff all over his hand.  
Kicking the arachnid away before it could launch a last-ditch strike, Ranma jumped over a deathcrawler attempting to spear him from behind, and began running into the barn he was helping defend.  
Another hiss came from door that separated the barn from the house, and Ranma backpedaled to a stop as yet another of the killer spiders smashed the door down, wiggling its fangs threateningly.  
Ranma looked back at the group at the barn exit, and then at the entrance to the house. The he noticed a pitchfork lying on the ground next to him.  
Ranma sighed as he picked it up. "You know, it'll be REAL ironic if I survive this." He whirled the rusted tool around in his hand, then aligned himself in a defensive stance. "I'm through running! Come on!"  
The deathcrawlers lunged.  
__________________________________________________________________________________  
  
Victory in Tokyo!  
"Civilians and leaders in Tokyo today were pleasantly stunned with the announcement of the final scattering of organized attackers upon Tokyo, officially ending the conflict that has besieged Tokyo for three years. This is a great victory for the greatest of Japan's once prosperous cities, which has been plagued by fear, unrest, violence, attack, and constant rumors of the ultimate failure of the defense forces, leading to Japan's final downfall. While Tokyo's endurance can be attributed almost fully to constant support from the U.S., Canada, and English military, which has been spread rather thin dealing with the slaughter in Asia, the final blow most certainly came from the newly introduced magical experts present in Tokyo. Less than a year prior, a group of magic users claiming to be from another world offered to construct a magic guild in Tokyo and aid in the war. Though subject to much understandable suspicion and even some violence, the mages have proven to be an essential component to the defense of what is now left of Japan, and now magic research is being openly traded on channels between America and Japan, as well as some European countries. Ultimately, however, the thanks for the successful purging of the area outside of Tokyo goes to a surprisingly benevolent 'demon lord' by the given name of Doppler Thaeramon. Though his presence and acceptance in Tokyo has sparked a great deal of conflict and unrest, it has also paved the way for the possibility of co-existence between humans and the strange otherworldly creatures. Doppler himself gave a long speech praising the resiliency of the human race and condemning the barbaric beings from what he termed the 'Nexus'. Thaeramon was unavailable for comment after the speech."  
- U.S.A. newspaper, 1999  
__________________________________________________________________________________  
  
Ranma inhaled deeply, feeling the tang of the salty sea air as the wind whipped by him.  
All around the large boat, sparkling blue waves lapped at the sky, spraying mist about the water craft. It was a lovely sight, and Ranma hadn't had much time recently to enjoy the view. He had read somewhere that certain creatures that had come through the Nexus were actually causing a revitalization of certain ecosystems, removing harmful pollution and returning many areas to the kind of natural state that had been ruined centuries ago. Ranma snorted. THAT one was driving all the God-is-punishing-us religious nuts crazy. Never mind that most of the freaks messed up the Earth more than people ever did.  
At his back was strapped a wooden bo staff, and at his side was a sheathed katana. Of course, being 13, he hadn't really had an effective growth spurt yet, so the armament looked rather silly on him, but any who had seen him fight weren't quick to ask why he was carrying a staff taller than he was.  
Actually, he was on a ship headed for India to avoid being dragged into the New Japanese Empire's armed forces. Despite having finally won the battle to save the last city of their nation, by that time, nearly all the surviving troops were foreign forces on loan to Tokyo. And after Tokyo finally decided it could leave twenty-four hour alert after three years, they were quick to back up and bid their ward goodbye. Of course, the New Japanese Empire, as it had recently proclaimed itself, didn't stop its drafting efforts, and in fact once again dropped the age required for conscription in the search for soldiers to assist in taking back the lands that once made up the great nation of Japan.  
Ironically enough, Ranma was on his way to India to see if he could assist in the conflicts there, which kind of made him feel guilty about deserting his native country. The demonic armies were now massive war juggernauts that fielded actual strategy and brutal tactics against their opponents, using the advantage of their magical powers and unpredictable beasts to cut easily upward through Asia. He had heard that India was holding up much better though. Mostly because the largest forces, the ones that kept marching as American cruise missiles rained down in the middle of them, were all moving west.  
  
"Uh oh. This doesn't look good."  
Ranma's mind locked up as he heard the muttering of the Captain in the cabin behind him.  
"What?! What's happening?!" Ranma asked, scanning the waters. He was joined by several other men that had heard the man, and some others that had heard him. Almost all of them were armed, and few were past twenty.  
The Captain glanced at the pigtailed boy, then looked back into the sky. "Look at those clouds. We've got a mean storm coming. A real bad one."  
The Captain then experienced the agonizing discomfort of having several pairs of eyes stare at you in angry disbelief.  
"A STORM?!?! You're getting us all worked up about a storm?! I thought you had seen a sea monster or something!"  
"Geez! Afraid of a little wind! See what a deathcrawler can do to ya, and a bloody tornado seem like a joy." Several other passengers shook their heads and walked away.  
"Feh. Storm," Ranma muttered, turning back around toward the ocean.  
The Captain could do little but sweatdrop. They were right, after all.  
__________________________________________________________________________________  
  
New Technologies Propose Key to Israel's Defense.  
"Top American scientists unveiled their new magic technologies to Israeli diplomats today, stating that they could hold the key to future success during conventional combat in the new era of technology vs. magic warfare. Among the less reliable technologies presented was a fascinating article known as 'mithril', a special alloy which uses mana forge processes to temper older, more common metal alloys. This new metal has a constitution that defies belief, and completely surpasses all known composites and alloys. Mithril shows particular promise as an armor-piercing tip, and has been projected to pierce many of the magical fields and armors used by more potent demonic opponents. Several tons of mithril-tipped missiles and cannon shells have already been requested by Israel, and the final outcome of the Death March looks more hopeful every day as magic and technology are merged for the common defense of civilization."  
- Israeli newspaper, 2002  
__________________________________________________________________________________  
  
"Hmmmm... Looks like America finally annexed Mexico. Took them long enough." Ranma mused, looking over his newspaper. Occasionally he would tear his eyes away from the headlines to look at the stars, bright and scattered across the clear night sky. By new Israeli laws, no big lights were allowed on at night, which made it easy to see the night sky even from the streets of Jerusalem.  
Not that he was on the streets at the moment. No, not Ranma. The pigtailed boy was currently lying down atop one of the supply depots, reading his paper by way of a small magical crystal he had bought that emitted light endlessly. Quite a useful little trinket.  
"Ranma?"  
"Yo Karen. Over here." Ranma still hadn't picked up Hebrew yet, but he had learned English a long time ago, and had gotten enough practice with other people who speak it that he was practically fluent.  
Karen Molsk stood up easily on the roof, pulling herself through the small roof access panel. Clearly, the roof was not made for people to be climbing on it save for maintenance. But had that ever stopped Ranma? Ha!  
"It took some smooth talking, but I finally got it," 'That jerk had better appreciate this,' she thought, holding out a small box to her friend and fellow soldier. Not that Ranma was really a soldier, but he fought like one, for sure.  
"SWEET!! Thanks!" Ranma exclaimed, snatching the package away and holding the crystal above it. After grinning at the box label, he tore it open, and smoothly pulled out the object inside. "A Nighthawk .50 caliber pistol! You're the best Karen!"  
She was about to disagree with him in traditional display of (false) modesty, when she found herself being scooped into a warm hug. Blushing furiously, the Israeli girl's protest was reduced to a feeble stutter until Ranma gently let go to examine his new gun.  
Karen gulped slightly and tried to collect her wits. It wasn't much of a secret that she found Ranma remarkably attractive. He was good-looking, a fighter of astounding ability, and... well... different.  
Most people his age were immature little kids, teenagers who thought they knew everything and would do anything for sex. On the flip side, many of those teenagers who had grown up alongside the Death March and the horrors it brought had either become cold, emotionless shells, or gruff, hardened killing machines that slept with their guns loaded and the safety off.  
Ranma was different. He hadn't just grown up WITH the Death March, he had grown up IN it. He had seen brutality, slaughter, and suffering. But he wasn't cold or brutal. At least, not off the battlefield. Ranma could be so carefree and happy, and was never too afraid or too depressed to have fun. But he could be serious, too, when the situation called for it. And besides that, he was one of the few boys she had met that had some measure of control over his libido (much to her great frustration).  
Looking at him now, checking his pistol as the glow from his crystal illuminated one side of him...  
'God, he is SO sexy... whoa, simmer down girl!' Trying to distract herself, she noticed the newspaper just barely visible from the meager light of the crystal. "So, what's up in the North?"  
Ranma glanced at her, and then realized what she meant. "Well, Moscow's still holding up with that magic shield thingy. Of course, they still have that problem with zombies popping up all over the place UNDER the shield, but they've gotta take what they can get."  
Ranma slipped the weapon into his pants pocket, and held up his crystal to get a better look at her. Karen was very popular for two main reasons: one, because she was the most successful student in Israel's mage training program, and two, because she was one of the hottest babes that could be found in the barracks. Of course, she was also only 16, and that had caused its fair share of complications in both matters. Ranma could still feel the small measure of sympathy he had for an army Major who had gotten a little too friendly with Karen and had inadvertently made himself the test subject of a low-level magic spell. That in itself was understandable, but she didn't have to blast him THERE.  
Karen was tall for her age, with light, sandy hair that was tied into a long ponytail at the back of her head. Her trim figure was well-maintained by her constant combat exercises, which Ranma himself had contributed to. And, if Ranma did say so himself, she had quite an impressive rack, too.  
It was about at that point that he realized he was staring at her body again, and Ranma jerked his head away to look at the stars instead. 'Real smooth, jerk!' he chastised. Ranma could keep focused and look past a pretty face and a curved body better than most boys his age, and he'd be the first to say so, but he still got certain urges sometimes. Particularly around girls that he had spent a lot of time fighting or talking with. Ranma often found it best to just play it cool and pretend like nothing was happening.  
  
Breaking the uneasy staring, Karen cautiously walked next to where Ranma was standing and sat down on the tiled roof, raising her gaze to look at the stars. Seeing little alternative but to join her, Ranma fell straight down onto his back, his eyes on the sky.  
After a long moment, Karen finally broke the silence.  
"What is it all for, Ranma?"  
The pigtailed boy blinked. This sounded like the beginning of one of those deep, unrealistic philosophy-type questions. Great. "What?"  
"The fighting. The killing." She sighed deeply. "Are we, as a race, so horrid, so vile, that we have to be wiped out like this? What great misdeed sparked it all? What horrible crime has humanity committed to deserve all of this?"  
Ranma blinked. "Well, there was that Bill Clinton guy. Ow!"  
Karen stopped pinching his leg. "I'm being serious, dope." She smiled a bit, but waited for Ranma to answer the question seriously.  
Ranma sighed. "I don't think we did anything. I don't believe in karma, or that life is fair or just. The fact is, those things are out there, and a large majority of them just see us as big snacks with pop guns."  
"And we see them as ruthless, merciless marauders that have to be taken down at all costs." Karen mused.  
Ranma rolled his eyes. "And are we wrong?"  
"......................."  
"That's what I thought."  
Karen thought about pinching him again, but decided against it. "I don't know. I just get tired of it, you know? All we ever do is fight, and far too often, we kill. How much longer Ranma? How much longer will this go on? How much longer CAN it go on? The U.S. has already nuked the Nexus FOUR times, and the bloody thing just got dusty. We've all seen the reports of actual intelligent beings behind the armies fighting near the European border. When will it all end?"  
Ranma noted the stress in her voice near the end, and winced internally. Karen didn't cry often-she was too strong for that-but when she did, it drove Ranma to the peak of mental agony to hear. The Israeli girl had lost both of her parents in the initial defense aimed to drive back the demonic invaders. The first lines had, as they had in every other battle like it, been smashed more quickly and brutally than any of the generals could've anticipated. The defense had held, but the casualties by the end of the day had been heartwrenching.  
Karen desperately fought back tears as she found herself remembering her parents once again, gritting her teeth and trying to find something, anything, to distract her. They had been killed quickly and efficiently, and in such a manner that it had been a simple task to identify their corpses on the battlefield. Certainly a much better death than that of the men in the barracks the next evening, when a sac of deathcrawler eggs had hatched-  
'No! Stop thinking about it! Just...' her thoughts trailed off as she felt Ranma's large hand encompass her own. Then she felt herself being gently drawn into a hug, and all her speculation and anxiety melted away as she wrapped her arms around Ranma's waist.  
"I... I'm sorry. I really am I bother sometimes, aren't I?" She chuckled weakly into his ear.  
"Oh, hush you." Ranma mumbled pleasantly, and then gave the ponytailed girl a peck on the cheek. It wasn't until after he noticed her blush (in the pale glow from his crystal) that he wondered just what the hell he was doing.  
In complete panic, he spread his arms, only to find that she had quite firmly attached herself to him.  
Karen sighed deeply, pressing her body against Ranma's, and rested her head on his shoulder. "For just one night... let's forget fighting..." she whispered huskily, her hands straying away from Ranma's back.  
Ranma's mind locked up as she moved her head to face him, and then kissed him full on the lips, savoring his warmth in the slight chill of the desert night.  
Ranma soon began to respond in kind, though the parts of his brain that hadn't simply ceased function and surrendered to teenage hormones were mostly concerned with how far Karen was planning to take this. Ranma really didn't want to get hurt (physically or otherwise), but he especially didn't want to hurt Karen.  
As she tipped him over to pin him on the roof, Ranma broke the kiss to look her in the eyes.  
"Ka-Karen, I... I don't know if we should do this..." Ranma mumbled, fighting his own instincts.  
"And why not?" The Israeli girl breathed, before kissing Ranma neck roughly, pressing her body firmly against his.  
Ranma gulped as he felt the tender caress of her lips along his neck, and physically restrained his hands from moving off the tiled roof. "I... Ka-Karen..." he stuttered, unable to piece together his thoughts beyond the girl's name.  
To his relief/regret, he felt her shift slightly, and the pleasant sensation of Karen's lips and tongue on his neck ceased. Apparently, she was going to wait for an actual answer.  
Taking a deep breath, Ranma began, "Karen... I'm not going to stay here. I don't want you to get hurt. Not because of me. And whatever happens between us, I can't always be there for you." Ranma mentally swore at himself. Not only because he sounded lame and sappy, but also because he knew that everything he was saying was absolutely true. "I don't want us to do something that we'll regret tomorrow," Ranma finished, profusely thankful that he was able to spit it all out without screwing up.  
"You're such a dimwit," Karen muttered softly.  
'Okay, so maybe I did screw up,' Ranma thought.  
The Israeli girl shifted herself again to look Ranma in the eyes, unmindful that she was still pressing her voluptuous body against his. "Do you think the future matters, in this world? Do you think hurt feelings matter? When we fight every day and could be killed at any moment without even knowing what hit us, you still think that we should worry about little regrets and shattered feelings?" She smirked slightly as she lowered her voice. "And most of all, you think that I would actually regret making love to you? Dimwit."  
Ranma blinked. "Uh... well, when you put it that wa-mmmph!"  
As she kissed him deeply, Karen's hand found Ranma's wrist, and she softly dug her fingers into his fist to take hold of the small crystal that was the last source of significant light on the roof.  
And then, with a flick of her wrist, she sent it sailing off the edge of the roof, and down to the streets below.  
"Hey! My crystal! I paid money for that thing!"  
"Shut up and get naked."  
__________________________________________________________________________________  
  
7 Year War Finally Ends, New World Demands Leadership  
"Official reports place the final scattering of the final demonic army at 6:30 PM Atlantic Time, marking the official end of the Death March, the single most devastating conflict in Earth's written history. While fleeing the rain of mithril-tipped rocket and artillery fire that annihilated the final demonic army (commonly known as the Three Legions), the psilor Demetrius Yaermon was disabled in a fierce battle against U.S. magi-soldiers, and then apprehended by conventional ground forces. Yaermon will be escorted to an undisclosed location using maximum security, whereupon he will be tried before a military tribunal for his numerous war crimes. This process is, even as it's being implemented, being heavily debated, as it's questionable whether Yaermon would be subject to such laws and procedures, given his status as a non-human, and major player in the 7-year crisis. As the final remnants of the organized demonic armies retreated into the East, the world celebrated the end of the supernatural threat that was once predicted to overcome the entire planet. Even so, new controversies are already being discussed, such as the place of these new creatures in the new world east of the European borders. Integration of humans and intelligent, benevolent non-humans is a subject of great debate, as the human race can hardly forgive so recent a conflict. The U.S., Canada, the New Japanese Empire, and Australia currently lead the world in non-human integration, although the number of intelligent NHs in North America is estimated at less than 400 total. The total casualty rate of the Death March is staggering, and most analysts have given up more than vague guesses as fluctuating communications and re-exploration continue to unearth new information. Of the countries of Asia, none remained unscathed. Israel has weathered the assault the best out of everything east of Europe, and reports minimal damage, with a relatively low loss of life. Other countries, such as China, India, Korea, and Vietnam have been totally overrun, and it's questionable whether humans remain. Much of the Middle East has been wiped out, and the countries surrounding Israel shattered. Contacts in Africa report the appearance of strange, new animals, but there are no indications of further military organization among the NHs. Alongside all the questions that plague the new world are the mysteries of the seemingly indestructible Nexus that sparked the conflict, and scientific convoys are being prepared to make trips into other worlds and report the findings."  
- U.S.A. newspaper, 2003  
__________________________________________________________________________________  
  
Ranma put down the newspaper, musing to himself.  
"Huh. Going into the other worlds eh? Just sounds like more trouble to me." He rolled up the newspaper and tossed it onto the fire he had built, and the flames rose a little higher as the paper was quickly consumed. "You'd think they'd have had enough of those 'other worlds' without actually seeing them." Shaking his head at the foolish curiosity of mankind, Ranma laid himself onto his back, resting his head on his arms.  
He was dressed in long black sweatpants and a plain long-sleeve shirt with a thick leather vest over it. On his feet were some steel-toed hiking boots, and he had a belt on that held a small array of items and weapons, among them his Nighthawk, a combat knife, and his katana. His old staff had been traded, along with a substantial portion of his funds, for a push-button, mithril-plated extendible one. Mithril was in high demand these days, and very poor supply. America was the only place that had the techniques and technology to mass-produce it, and even then in surprisingly small quantities. The rest of the world relied on either trade with the U.S. or a few scattered, extremely knowledgeable smiths who had found out how to make the precious metal.  
Ranma was currently enjoying the sights of the once-great city of Beijing. Namely, the ruins of the buildings that had once made up the city. While it was beautiful sight, seeing the shattered place overgrown with vegetation and growing foliage, it was also very depressing. There was also the fact that much of the 'wildlife' that now populated the urban region was not native to Earth, and tended to think of human beings as little more than light meals that made lots of different noises as they were eaten.  
The pigtailed boy sighed to himself. He was hoping to have found some small village, or perhaps a fortified bunker where a group of people were hiding, but all of the surrounding villages had said that Beijing was dead, and it appeared they were right. Especially the industrial sector. He'd never seen so many zombies in his life!  
Nope, the only intelligent life around here was himself, and maybe that wyvern flying just a few kilometers away.  
Ranma blinked. Wyvern?  
Sitting up, the pigtailed boy scanned the skyline, and saw that there was, indeed, a wyvern flying above the empty buildings of Beijing. The mighty pseudo dragon flew in a tight ellipse, always ensuring that it remained within a small area. After a few moments of watching, Ranma realized that its orbit was getting smaller. After a few more, he corrected himself; the orbit wasn't getting smaller. The center was moving.  
Ranma could already guess at what was going on, but nonetheless, he reached into his nearby backpack and took out a pair of binoculars.  
Through the binoculars, Ranma confirmed what he had already expected: that wyvern was a trained guard animal. No wild creature would linger so long over potential prey, and besides, it had a huge metal collar and restraints on.  
Given that what it was guarding was moving, Ranma guessed that it was some kind of convoy.  
'Well, might as well check it out," Ranma mused, pulling his backpack over his shoulder.  
  
As he ran toward the main streets, Ranma pulled out a block of C-4 and a remote detonator from his pack. While new-age magic technology was extremely rare and valuable, conventional weapons could pretty much be found lying on the ground by anyone who bothered to search for long enough. Ranma had found a stash of high-grade military explosives packed in a wrecked car in Libya, and taken a bit for himself and left the rest after finding a detonator. Never knew when you might need to blow something up, after all.  
Coming up under a shop that looked like it had been chopped in half, Ranma gently stuck the explosives on the underside of a large rock atop some piled rubble and set the trigger.  
  
Walking away from his trap, Ranma edged around the building and brought his binoculars to his eyes as he spied the convoy.  
He was surprised when he got a good look at it. An oversized wagon dominated the center of the procession, with a humanoid who was obviously a mage atop it. It was being pulled by a reaper; one of the massive, armored beasts that he had seen back in the first village that had been attacked. It was surrounded by vicoids and lizardmen, all armed fairly well and keeping pace easily.  
What really caught Ranma's attention, however, was three figures that trailed the wagon a little more closely and carefully than the others. Namely, because they were chained to it. Two humans-one male, one female-and a werewolf were being transported in a manner that clearly identified them as slaves. The werewolf was in the animal form of his lycanthrope heritage, and seemed to walk much more heavily and proudly than the broken man and woman, even as his back was covered with scars.  
Ranma grit his teeth. Only a wound inflicted with silver could scar a lycanthrope; anything else healed quickly and without a scratch. And to whip a lycanthrope with silver (as this one clearly had been) was equivalent to torture.  
Ranma put down his binoculars. He couldn't tell from this distance, but it was likely the humans had undergone similar agonies. And whether or not they actually had, one thing about this convoy was clear: whoever was in charge kept slaves. And to Ranma, slavery was a big no-no.  
'Well, it's time to crash this party.' Ranma stealthily crept up closer to the convoy, and then discreetly followed when the column was forced to move around a corner to weave through the buildings. Always, Ranma would duck under an overhang or any projection when the wyvern flew overhead, counting off the seconds before it had turned around and then counting the number of seconds before it completed the loop and came back.  
As Ranma determined he was far enough away from the explosives to begin, he wondered exactly what kind of cargo was so important that the owner would need it protected by a trained wyvern and no less 30 creatures, many of which could charge and fight under sustained machine gun fire.  
'Oh well. Time for that later.' Ranma fished the detonator from his pocket, and pushed the button.  
*THROOOOM!!!*  
The entire group jerked to a halt as the explosion detonated far behind them, and all the guards immediately took up fighting positions. It was far from unknown for groups of NHs (Non-Humans, a politically correct term given to the demons and creatures that crossed from the Nexus into Earth), malicious or not, to be assaulted by a wandering tank or troop division, and the explosion had been unusually loud.  
The wyvern narrowed its eyes as it caught sight of the smoke from the blast site, and shot up into the air with a powerful flap of its large wings before diving towards the source, eager to protect its quarry.  
As the wyvern flew away to investigate, the mage, cloaked in a wizard's robe and hood, addressed the soldiers. "Calm down and keep moving. The lizard will take care of whatever it was."  
*Blam!!* *Blam!!*  
The entire procession jerked to a stop again, and everyone turned toward the source of the gunshots, save the two lizardmen who fell to the ground, bloody holes through their skulls.  
Ranma grinned, and holstered his Nighthawk. "All right, we can do this the easy way, or the hard-"  
"Kill him," the mage interrupted.  
"Righty-o," Ranma muttered, and then ducked down as the troops charged.  
*K-shing!* *Shyang!* Ranma moved much faster than any of the monsters had expected, and one lizardman found the blade of a fine-edged katana slicing through his midsection and soft leather armor even as Ranma drew it from its sheath. Cutting in a wide circle, Ranma caught another lizardman across the face, slicing open its head before kicking it firmly to the side.  
Ranma ducked under a vicoid's sword, and then punched it straight in the chest armor, throwing the insecticoid onto its back. Lizardmen were cannon fodder; creatures that were generally stronger and faster than humans, but with little else to show for their species. Vicoids, on the other hand, could shrug off bullets, and a katana's edge was all but worthless against their rock-like carapace.  
Ranma flipped backward over another sword slash, kicking the attacking vicoid in the back of the head as he did so. Once he touched the ground, Ranma quickly sheathed his katana, and then withdrew his bo staff from its holster on his back.  
*K-shink!* *Clang!* Ranma deflected a number of attacks, and then whipped the staff around and under his arm to smash into a vicoid's chin, sending the warrior hurtling backwards through the air. Then he jammed the staff backwards, hearing a satisfying *Crack!* as the insecticoid attacker's shell split open from the force.  
  
The mage frowned deeply as he watched the boy, a human of no more than 17 if looks were any indication, engaged the 24 remaining defenders, whipping his staff around at high speed to create a strong defensive zone around him. Two soldiers tried to attack through the perimeter, and found their weapons wrenched from their hands and knocked far across the broken streets as a result.  
Looking at the rear of the wagon, the mage could see the two humans huddled in a mutual embrace underneath, not daring to even look at the conflict. Meanwhile, the werewolf looked over its shoulder at the fight, an amused expression on its face.  
By the time the cloaked figure's gaze returned to the engagement, 3 more soldiers had been dispatched; two of them dead, while the other vicoid had had its legs crushed in such a manner that it would likely never stand again.  
The mage's gaze darkened. Knowing trained wyverns as well as he did, the creature would probably spend a number of minutes still searching for the source of the explosion (even longer if it had found something of interest), and wouldn't come much more quickly even if it saw the battle back at the cargo wagon.  
One more vicoid went down, having its wrist smashed with the staff first before being spin-kicked away. The boy was obviously concentrating on the insecticoids, so that he could finish the battle fighting the more fragile lizardmen.  
"Enough!!" The mage spread his hands out, and blue light flared around his fists before he began chanting some words softly to himself.  
The soldiers understood this to mean for them to move aside, and did so. Magic was far more discriminatory than most other natural forces, but one still avoided being between it and the target if one valued his life.  
One vicoid was a tad too slow, and was tripped up by the end of Ranma's staff before he was smashed aside hard enough to shatter most of the bones in his chest.  
  
Ranma looked up at the mage and sighed. Great. Magic. Now that he was close enough, he could see the colored tattoo-like marks on the mage's face that identified his race. The evons were extremely human-like physically, and had been mistaken, quite understandably, as humans with tattoos and face paintings when they had first appeared during the Death March. They were unique demons, and had strong natural affinities for magic manipulation. They were also unique in that their race wasn't particularly biased toward humanity. Some of them were almost unreasonably understanding and tolerant, while others, like this jerk, were of a more malicious bent.  
"Rhekto no choh KA!!!" The evon shouted, and several small spheres of lightning flew from his hands toward Ranma.  
Ranma grit his teeth and began dodging, as the bolts were spread out widely in an attempt to negate his superior agility. And it worked, to a point.  
As he felt the heat of the detonations around him, and avoided more of the incoming blasts, Ranma withdrew his pistol from its holster.  
The mage noticed the movement, and quickly completed casting his second spell. "-no choh KA!!!"  
*Blam!!* *Blam!!* *Choom!!* Two shots were fired before the ribbon of lightning blasted into Ranma, sending the pigtailed boy to his knees.  
The mage blinked, realizing that neither of the bullets had struck him. Had the human fired at him and missed?  
Ranma grunted as his muscles spasmed from the electricity coursing through him, and slowly pushed himself up, making sure to display as much fatigue and pain as he could. Fighting creatures many times more powerful than him hadn't exactly humbled the young martial artist, but he did learn that displaying weakness didn't always result in a loss. Arrogance was everyone's enemy.  
The evon floated down gently to the ground, smirking. Then he noticed that many of the soldiers were looking at him nervously. "What?"  
Feeling something tap him on the shoulder, the mage turned swiftly, and his eyes widened. The werewolf's silver wrist cuffs were lying on the ground, broken at the lock, and the way he was baring his teeth, and the proximity of his claws, boded very ill for the remaining convoy defenders. The evon spent his last moments reflecting upon how difficult it must have been to hit the locks on the cuffs from Ranma's distance.  
  
The rest of the troops were in a quandary. On the one hand, they should probably get to work on pacifying the werewolf immediately, before the pigtailed boy regained his bearings fully. On the other hand, the boy had begun attacking them again, and the mage had just had his chest gouged out of him.  
Never let it be said that front-line cannon fodder troops were COMPLETE idiots.  
  
Ranma snorted as the lizardmen fled quickly into the surrounding buildings, their morale broken. The last vicoid wasn't so easily spooked, and Ranma had been forced to put it down the hard way.  
The pigtailed boy quickly approached the wagon, and immediately forced apart the shackles on the two bewildered humans.  
"Are you guys okay? You'd better get out of here!"  
The two former slaves looked at each other, then none-too-discreetly moved themselves so that Ranma was in-between them and the werewolf. "Aren't you going to kill that one, too?"  
Ranma blinked. "Why? Isn't he your friend?"  
The man scoffed. "Our friend?! Are you blind, man? Look at him!" The woman attempted to calm him, and the man stopped his tirade, glaring fiercely at the creature behind the safety of Ranma's body.  
Ranma rolled his eyes. He recognized blind hatred when he saw it. Not that he could really blame the guy, being a slave and all. "Look, I'll take care of this one. You just skedaddle, all right?"  
"Thank you! Thank you so much!" The woman thanked profusely, dragging the man behind him into the streets of Beijing.  
Ranma watched them go, then turned to the werewolf. It stared back at him emotionlessly, blood still dripping from its claws.  
"So... you gonna thank me, or try and kill me?" Ranma wondered aloud, putting away his staff. If the thing did turn hostile, the katana would be a better choice against an unarmored foe.  
The wolf's maw stretched into a rather disturbing looking smile (one that showed lots of teeth), and it spoke.  
"Reshall yrah grathul nog matta shyau?"  
Ranma blinked. "Uhm... sorry man. You speak English? Or Japanese? Chinese? No?" Ranma scratched his head. While traveling all over the world had revealed a hidden talent of his for speaking foreign languages, he had never picked up any demonic or tribal tongue.  
The werewolf snorted, nonplussed. Then the towering beast turned and walked away, its large tail brushing Ranma's legs as it stalked off.  
"Well... fine, be that way," Ranma muttered. Oh well. It wasn't important anyway. "Now to see what's in this wagon.  
  
Ranma didn't have an official profession as a wanderer. Many like him were mercenaries, or, if they were more specialized in who they fought, they would term themselves bounty hunters or demon hunters (the latter career path being noticeably rarer and more unwelcome among certain parts; demons still more or less ruled the devastated wastelands of Asia). While he did a bit of each at some point, Ranma had always found a certain joy in treasure hunting (that he mostly hunted the treasure that some monster wielded or hoarded was not a coincidence).  
Entering the wagon, Ranma grinned as he saw the multitude of chests and trunks within. Whoever was going to receive this had a great deal of influence indeed. And seeing how the loser saw fit to keep slaves, Ranma had few qualms about helping himself to the guy's stuff.  
Looking around, a chest near the center of the hold caught his eye. Not because it was inlaid with gold or gems, like some of them were, but in fact because it stood out as the most plain and sturdy-looking of the containers. And besides, it didn't have a visible lock.  
Ranma soon found out, unfortunately, that the case actually possessed an 'invisible' lock. When he tried to pry the chest open, the lid simply refused to budge, and Ranma noticed a slight green glow come from the crack that he was trying to pry open. A locking spell. No key or lockpick in the world could open it.  
Ranma reached into his pocket, and pulled out a translucent crystal with a slight yellow tint. One of these, however...  
Holding the crystal near the chest lid, the green glow intensified considerably, and Ranma grunted as he felt the invisible bond give way.  
Chuckling to himself, Ranma pocketed the magic disruptor once again, and then leaned over to look at the chest.  
"Neato! Nice glove!" Ranma reached in and pulled out the sole item in the chest: a large, black gauntlet. It was rather heavy, with tough but flexible plating to protect the entire hand. It had a metal-plated wristguard with a blue oval gem set in it, and another gem of the same size and shape set in the back of the hand. The position of the thumb indicated that this item was for the right hand.  
"Huh. Whoever bought this thing got ripped off. There's only one."  
"Yo, numbskull! What're you doing?! And what was all that noise outside?!"  
Ranma whipped around as he heard the voice, his hand already on the hilt of his katana. However, when he looked around, he could see no one.  
"Huh? Who said that?"  
"What do you mean 'who said that'?" The voice snapped, "it's me! In the cage, dimwit!"  
Ranma blinked, noting that there was a large birdcage off to the side of the cargo hold, with a large sheet covering it.  
Walking cautiously, he unconsciously slipped the gauntlet over his right hand, noting absently that it seemed to shrink and reform itself to the shape of his hand as he did so. Weird.  
Ready for anything, Ranma grabbed a corner of the sheet and then snatched it off quickly.  
"That's bett-what the heck? You're not an evon!"  
Ranma stared blandly at the foot-and-a-half long mini-dragon that was seated on a perch in the bird cage. "And you're not a lizardman," he deadpanned. "Now that we have that out of the way, what are you?"  
The creature blinked up at him. "Me? Ha! I'll have you know that I'm a dragon!"  
"Yes," Ranma drawled, "I'd kinda guessed that." The mini-dragon looked like the variety normally portrayed in the west. It had a thin, serpentine body, with two strong-looking hind legs, and two much smaller front legs. It's mouth was formed into a sharp beak, and it had a pair of sharp-looking wings that were currently folded up over its back. Most interesting of all, however, was that rather than scales, it looked to be protected by silvery, overlaying metal segments that covered its entire body, from under its skull to the tip of its tail.  
The dragon looked a little miffed at his response, and jerked its snout up at him. "I'll have you know I'm a very rare type of dragon."  
"The fun-size type?" Ranma guessed, smirking as he crossed his arms over his chest.  
"I'll let that one pass," the dragon muttered, "I happen to be a real, live, in-the-steel metadragon! One of the last of my kind!"  
Ranma snorted. "You're kind must not be much, if they're almost gone and you're what's left."  
The metadragon's eye twitched slightly, and it looked like it was going to come up with a scathing reply, when an idea suddenly occurred to it. "Hey! Are you here to rescue me?"  
Ranma blinked. "Rescue you?"  
"Yeah!" The creature shouted happily, spreading its wings, "I'm supposed to be kept as some kind of stupid pet for some demon lord in the north that raises dragons. Do you think you could let me out?"  
Ranma pursed his lips. "I don't know. I don't think it's right, just letting a dragon out to run wild. You guys can cause some serious damage when you grow up." Then another thought occurred to Ranma. "Assuming you lived long enough to grow up. It's really dangerous out there, and I don't think something your size could survive."  
The dragon bigsweated. "I could go with you! C'mon! Anything's better than being left in this cage!"  
Ranma's face darkened. "With me? You've gotta be kidding me."  
"I'm serious!" it insisted, "We'll be best buds! C'mon! Think about it: having your own little dragon companion to keep you company!"  
Ranma snorted. "Please. That sounds like some like a contrived fantasy theme for some bad piece of fiction or something. Besides," he added, turning around, "I don't really like dragons."  
The metadragon blinked. "Why not?"  
"Because the last time I met one, it ate a bunch of my friends," Ranma spat, not turning around.  
The mini-dragon sweatdropped. "Well, that's why one doesn't normally fight dragons. It's kind of stupid, really."  
Ranma turned around and glared at the silvery beast. "It died slowly for that. Last I heard, they were making tiny things out of what was left of its skull."  
The little metadragon's eyes went wide, and it chuckled nervously. "Eh heh heh... look, could you just take me with you? Please? I can be real helpful!"  
"Like how?" Ranma asked, smirking.  
The little creature thought for a bit. "Well... you didn't make that much noise, so you probably didn't fight the wyvern that was guarding this wagon. There's one protecting it, you know."  
Ranma's smirk grew. "I already knew that. Try again."  
"Uh... okay... well, did you know that it's right behind you?"  
Ranma blinked, and then slowly turned around.  
Large, yellow eyes stared back at him, set in a massive beak half as big as Ranma's whole body. Apparently the wyvern had finished checking the detonation and returned to protect its cargo.  
Ranma turned toward the metadragon. "I'm already starting to not like you." It sweatdropped.  
"GrrraaaaaAAAAAAAH..." The pseudo-dragon began sucking in air, preparing to toast the entire wagon with a jet of fire.  
Ranma panicked, and seeing no alternative way out of the cargo hold, jumped forward, grabbing both halves of the creature's beak and slamming them shut.  
*FWOOM!* The pigtailed boy flinched back as a sharp puff of fire blasted out of the corners of the wyvern's beak, and the creature he was holding adopted a look of intense pain.  
Attempting to crush the human, the wyvern threw its head to the side sharply. Unfortunately for the large winged monster, Ranma had already let go, and it only succeeded in slamming its head into the side of the cargo hold, knocking the entire wagon over.  
  
The wyvern withdrew it head quickly, and stepped back, coughing up smoke and ash fiercely. That had NEVER happened before!  
As it finally reoriented itself, the wyvern glared at the overturned wagon. Near the front, the lone reaper that had pulled the vehicle stood calmly, cleaning its mighty scythes with its mandibles. It was really amazing how easily the creatures could be trained, from bloodthirsty ravagers, to docile pack animals.  
Deciding to try again, the wyvern sucked in a deep breath, and then blew out a thin stream of fire straight into the cargo wagon, causing parts of it to splinter and vibrate. This rather spooked out the reaper, who began to scuttle away, ignorant or oblivious to the fact that the wagon was actually tied to it.  
The wyvern coughed up a bit more ash as it watched the blazing wagon get dragged away. Served the stupid human right.  
"You know, you just burned up a lot of cool stuff," Ranma speculated, leaning on the pseudo-dragon's leg.  
The wyvern glared down at him, then returned to gazing at the wagon in satisfaction.  
Then it snapped its head back down, its eyes wide, and its jaw slack.  
Ranma smiled up at the huge beast, the bird cage that held the tiny metadragon at his feet. "Did you miss me?" Then he took advantage of the wyvern's stunned state, and tossed a brick of C-4 into its mouth before snapping the beak shut like before.  
The wyvern swallowed reflexively, then snatched its head back, growling deeply. It would show this human to trifle with the likes of him!  
Wyverns were not considered real dragons for a number of reasons, among them being their limited intelligence. Had Ranma been facing a real dragon, it might have very well wondered why the 'weak, puny human' had pulled out a small black rectangular box to face a mighty creature well over thrice his size.  
*THOOOOM* The wyvern's entire body jerked mightily, and its eyes bulged out of its head. Then it spat up a final puff of smoke and fell heavily onto its side, dead as the vicoid corpses that it crushed while doing so.  
  
The metadragon watched the whole affair with huge eyes. "Damn... you ARE good!"  
Ranma smirked at the creature. "Heh. Hey, maybe you're not so bad after all. C'mere." Ranma kneeled onto the ground, and pried open the small, but strong lock with his combat knife.  
"Oh, I see how it is. Stroke your ego, and I get to stay, huh?" The dragon muttered.  
Ranma smirked some more. "Well, you gotta earn your keep, right? The name's Ranma, by the way. Ranma Saotome. Hmmmmmmmm... I think I'll call you 'K'."  
K blinked as he stepped out of the cage and onto the street. "'K'? What kind of a name is that?"  
Ranma shrugged. "Well, what were you called before?"  
K snorted. "Feh. My parents gave me a name in our native dragon tongue. It's a title so utterly complex and eloquent that your human mind couldn't possibly comprehend it."  
Ranma raised an eyebrow. "Try me."  
"It was 'Tom'," the metadragon explained slowly.  
"............................ Right. 'K' it is."  
  
**********************************************************************************  
  
End Chapter 1  
  
Author's Notes:  
Well, I think this is pretty self-explanatory, but in case it's not, I'll go over the details of what exactly has happened in the world.  
First of all, most of Asia has been worked over by the invaders completely. All the nations have been torn apart, with the exception of Israel. A few scattered cities have largely survived, like Tokyo, Moscow, and some areas of Hong Kong, but the governments have totally lost control of the territory they used to hold.  
The devastated areas of Asia can be compared to pretty much any RPG; monsters roaming, scattered towns and farms, bandits, raiders, etc. After the Death March, which is the name given to the 7 year war between human civilization and the demonic invaders because of the prevalence of necromancy during the conflict, no country had enough remaining military power to go out and reclaim its borders from the wild monsters that have populated the area (save those countries that never lost any territory), or lend the weapons so that those devastated countries could do so.  
These lands now host a mix of magic and technology, as the creatures from the Nexus have learned to coexist with the surviving humans (or, in many cases, dominate them) without the influence of a greater power leading them to battle. The most tolerant areas with regards to human/NH relations are actually those areas without a government in place to enforce the peace, though this is also where the most violent conflict occurs between the two groups.  
In some areas, demons rule like Japanese warlords, taxing their people and in some cases actually running functional governments, though mistreatment and even slavery is common.  
Tokyo, the center of the New Japanese Empire, has become the world's great center for magic technology, and has learned much from its study of the invaders and proximity to the Nexus. It now ranks as the 6th most powerful country in terms of military and 8th most powerful in terms of economy. Keeping in mind that this is practically a single city (though it has grown much larger since the beginning of the Death March), the New Japanese Empire owes almost all of its success and survival to its study of magic. 


	2. Journeys

Humans: A Case Study  
  
[I have always been fascinated with lesser species that display great power and ability, despite an inferior gene selection and magical endowment. Studying them is a hobby that I've crafted into a science, yet at the same time, the very capabilities of these creatures defy the strict logic of the "human art" of science.]  
  
[My most recent foray in this area has been my experimentation with hybrids. It has been difficult, because many species that are intelligent enough for the process to yield useful results have traditions and beliefs that often interfere with interbreeding. This is not so much a problem in the creation of the hybrid itself, as we have advanced, impersonal ways of impregnating specimens, but actually in the hybrid's survival beyond its conception, as they are hardly tolerated and sometimes even murdered by their own kind.]  
  
[But I'm becoming side-tracked. Actually, while many of my experiments have been directed toward the merger of different species of beings, my latest interests have been directed toward that most populous and resourceful of creatures, the humans.]  
  
[Humans are, of course, the only native creatures in the Earth realm worth noting. Biologically, they are pitifully weak, and possess no inherent physical abilities that aren't apparent upon looking at one. However, their intelligence and ability toward analytic thought is astounding. We see this most commonly in Earth realm's "technology" (a term given to any significantly complex tool, or the general understanding and construction of such).]  
  
[It should also be noted that though I have encountered humans before in other realms, they seem to be of a different stock, somehow. Not only do the humans of other realms have a tendency to be stronger physically, but the Earth realm is the ONLY plane with such advanced technologies that humans never even made any attempt to study and advance magic. (It has been proposed that humans never realized magic existed, but isolated groups of knowledgeable magic-users and several legends referring to the use of magical energy have made this theory infeasible) However, because of the sheer diversity of the human race, I am unable to determine if the humans of the different planes are biologically different, or if they simply advanced differently through circumstances beyond my understanding.]  
  
[It was human technology alone that allowed them victory over the demons during the Death March. Though many may credit magic in various ways, it was the humans who found out how to utilize it, both through technological and traditional means. Astounding.]  
  
[One interesting theory that I've found places the humans as a failed "noble race". Obviously, they bear a very close physical similarity with the noble races, individually known as Evon, Elf, and Angel. Each of these races, with the inclusion of humans, share very similar physical and biological traits (the most differing form being that of Angel, as they possess wings), contain "pure souls", and can interbreed (though such an act is firmly discouraged by the noble races). However, the noble races all have lifespans ranging from centuries to infinity, as well as an inherent aptitude for using magical energy, and thus an aptitude for spellcasting. Though some humans are apparently adept at spellcasting, they have no inherent capability, and their average lifespan is something of less than a century!]  
  
[Is it possible that whatever circumstances or beings created the noble races created the humans alongside them? If so, why the clear inconsistencies in power and ability? Was this imbalance intentional, or did something unexpected happen? Also, I can hardly deny the fascinating possibility that HUMANS were actually the origin of the noble races and that certain magical influence (certainly powerful and precise in nature) forced an evolutionary split as certain humans were given abilities far beyond that of their brethren. Of course, such thoughts would scandalize the elves to no end, and probably the angels too. That's why I like the idea, really. Though I can't ignore the more commonly accepted offshoot of that theory, that humans were created by some groups of rogue elves or evon as a slave race. Though that would be deliciously ironic.]  
  
[I performed the most wonderfully entertaining experiment just the other day. I put a 600-year-old angel in a fighting pit, and endowed him with a fairly powerful magical blade from my personal collection, as well as a suit of mithril armor. Then I placed, on the opposite side, a young human male of no more than 14, and gave him an old shotgun, a piece of human technology, and four extra bullets for it.]  
  
[It turns out the human will win. Or at least he did this time. The angel wasn't very strong, and the human might've gotten in a lucky shot. I can see I'll have to repeat this experiment. Hopefully many times.]  
  
- Entry #4094 of Doppler Thaeramon's personal scientific journal  
  
Nexus II  
  
by Black Dragon  
  
http://www.angelfire.com/anime5/fanficlair  
  
Disclaimer... um... well, the dragon I stole from Slayers, I think. Maybe Rune Warrior. I forget. But anyway, if any lawyers ask, then K is actually a rare species of bat.  
  
As usual, words in " " are in Japanese or are presented phonetically, {" "} are languages other than Japanese, ' ' are thoughts, * * are sounds, and [ ] are writing.  
  
Chapter 2  
  
Journeys  
  
**********************************************************************************  
  
"And exactly how many of these villages are petitioning for free trade?" a dark, heavy voice cut through the stale, dank air of the gilded hall. It was a thoughtful voice; merciless, but not sadistic in nature.  
  
It's owner was a tall creature of obviously demonic origin. He was over 8 feet tall, and had the bulk to make his height seem natural. Every inch of bulging muscle that composed his frame was covered in rock-like plates of gray scales, which was in turn protected by a shining suit of polished half-plate with an unusually large, glowing ruby in the middle of the chest. The demon's head had several horns sticking out from the sides of the chin and the forehead, with several more sticking out of the back of his head, partially hidden beneath a large mane of black hair. The only other things that removed the demon from being humanoid was a rather long tail, and the fact that his two arms were very different from each other. The right hand, which currently clutched a paper note, was perfectly normal in nature, except that it was covered in the same scales as the rest of the creature's body. The left arm, however, was much longer and bigger, and ended in a terribly disproportionate-looking, double-bladed claw.  
  
Facing the demon was an ordinary-looking man, who stood at attention with his arms clasped behind his back.  
  
"Four of them, Lord Dashtall. Well, actually, three wish for free trade, while one wishes for a renegotiation of the regular taxes as well as the tariffs. It would appear that they believe they have a hard year ahead, and they want to pay their taxes through means other than providing livestock to feed your dragons."  
  
Dashtall snorted, blowing red dust from his nostrils and creating a thin cloud that seemed to suck the moisture from the air. "Unacceptable." The paper crumbled on its own as it was swallowed by the red cloud, and lit on fire within moments.  
  
The demon lord turned away, and began pacing parallel to the long table that decorated his hall. "You humans are such fickle creatures. If I give you too much freedom, you run amok doing as you please. If I ensure that those who defy me are destroyed and oppress you, you organize and revolt, and force me to destroy you. And if I give you some petty freedoms and keep you under my thumb, you keep struggling for more."  
  
The man shrugged. "Such is human nature, I suppose. We're difficult to enslave, and even more difficult to please."  
  
Dashtall snorted again, but a smile crossed his vaguely reptilian lips. "I don't know why I put up with you."  
  
"Well, SOMEBODY has to bring in food and money. That's what we specialize in."  
  
The demon lord cocked his head to one side slightly. "I suppose so. Very well, what would you suggest?"  
  
The advisor smiled. "Well now, I'd say immediately refuse to revoke the tariffs, and then quickly allocate more of your forces toward enforcing them. This will send the message that you won't punish orderly petition, but that your will IS, in the end, law. If the discontent escalates, I advise a small punishment, such as a double tax. I also suggest that you send someone to listen to the proposed renegotiations before you refuse it, so that they think you'll at least listen to them. The better response will also encourage the villagers to make their demands smaller in the future."  
  
Dashtall turned toward his advisor and wagged a finger at him. "You are GOOD, you know that?" He grinned.  
  
"Lord, you flatter me."  
  
"I do. After I'm done, make the arrangements immediately. What else requires my attention?"  
  
His advisor cleared his throat, and then took out a list from his pocket. Looking at the next item, he frowned.  
  
"I'm afraid I have a bit of bad news, my lord. A supply convoy of yours passing through China to the South Gateway was attacked."  
  
Dashtall jerked to attention, and immediately placed his clawed arm on the table as it twitched violently. "What?! The one with the wyvern guard?"  
  
The man nodded. "Yes my lord. Quite an unusual turn of events, actually. The convoy wagon itself was burned, but apparently the reaper that was towing it dragged it through enough debris to put the fire out. Many of the items inside suffered damage, but fortunately, its contents were recovered swiftly and are even now being moved to the vault for your inspection. However, I'm afraid the guard itself is quite a loss. All the vicoid soldiers, the wyvern, the evon mage Heshai'tan, and most of the lizardmen are dead, and your three favorite slaves apparently escaped or were captured."  
  
Dashtall's grip on the table tightened, and his advisor winced as the wood cracked and splintered as the claw sunk deeper into the table's surface. "Tell me... were all the contents recovered?"  
  
The advisor blinked. He had expected Dashtall to be rather upset about the loss of his slaves, especially the werewolf; the demon lord had had a lot of fun with that one. "I... I don't know, my lord. Your records for the convoy label its contents rather vaguely as 'jewels and precious items'. Other than the slaves you had sent south for your son to make use of, there is nothing else of any specific value that I know of."  
  
The demon lord sighed and let his claw fall from where it had gripped the table. "Yes, yes, I know. That was done to try and keep something like this from happening!" Damn it, he had made every effort to make that convoy both well-guarded and inconspicuous! Then again, that wyvern had probably attracted quite a lot of attention... blast it all! "I'll be blunt: when the wagon was recovered, did you find a small dragon with skin of metal, or a black gauntlet?" Neither item would have been destroyed in a mere fire, so if they hadn't been found...  
  
The advisor blinked. "No, my lord. Not to my knowledge, anyway. I know they would have noticed a dragon, but a gauntlet doesn't attract any particular attention, unless-"  
  
"I am told it has two large gems set in it," Dashtall interrupted.  
  
"Well, then no. I'm certain they would've noticed that, and the area was searched extensively for any items that had been strewn about."  
  
"DAMN IT!!!" *SLAM!!!* Dashtall slammed his heavy claw down on the table, and a blue flash of energy burst upward from the impact as the table buckled easily from the blow.  
  
The advisor sweatdropped as splinters began to fall around him. "Hmmm... am I to assume that the gauntlet you speak of has particular significance?" If there was in fact a dragon being transported, obviously Dashtall would be upset over its loss, but a mere gauntlet?  
  
The demon lord let a low hiss escape his throat as he slowly raised his claw, which was surrounded by a blue flame. "Tell me who did this..."  
  
The man calmly went back to his notes. "The lizardman that returned from the convoy reported that it was a single male humanoid fighter. A little less than 6 feet in height, black hair with a pigtail, hardened but unscarred features, lithe and a bit muscular, so on and so forth. He carried an extendible staff, a japanese sword, and a handgun, and apparently possesses considerable speed and strength."  
  
Dashtall narrowed his eyes. It took more than "considerable speed and strength" to kill a wyvern. "'Humanoid'? They're not sure what he is?"  
  
The man shook his head. "I'm sorry my lord, but no. He didn't have any unusual features, but he could have easily been hiding evon birthmarks, or pointed ears, and angels have been known to travel with their wings sealed. Or he may have been a demon in human guise. Of course, there's also a remote possibility that he was simply a human of unusual skill, and he was hiding nothing of his appearance. Whatever the case, he must not be taken lightly, as he dispatched the entire group of fighters without using any powers that would betray his species."  
  
"And what of the evon and wyvern?"  
  
"Apparently the wyvern was distracted by an explosion and was not present for the battle, though it was found dead at the site later. The lizardman claims that the attacker actually managed to free your werewolf from a distance, and that the lycanthrope killed Heshai'tan." He cleared his throat. "My lord, what shall I do with the guard that returned? He did abandon his post by retreating from the battle."  
  
Dashtall shrugged. "And in doing so, has given me hope of recovering what I have lost. Any creature that could dispatch so many fighters is well beyond a mere lizardman's hope of defeating. Send him to assist in enforcing the tariffs, if you will."  
  
"Yes, my lord. And what of the raider?"  
  
The demon lord raised his normal hand to his face, and slowly stroked one of the horns that stuck out of his chin. "Put out a notice to all my agents and all groups of bounty hunters within my influence. Offer a substantial reward for the recovery of the gauntlet, and the head of whatever man possessed it. Put out a similar offer for the recovery of a small dragon with metal skin. It's unlikely that a raider would bother to take a creature with him, but it's a possibility, and a dragon would attract notable attention."  
  
The advisor raised an eyebrow, but wrote down his instructions. "I see... you want the man's head? Are you sure you wouldn't like him taken alive, to be tortured, or perhaps dropped in the dragon pits?"  
  
Dashtall shook his head seriously. "As much as I would like that, I can't risk anyone trying anything less than lethal force to recover these items for me."  
  
The human nodded. "Head it is, then. Now, all I need is a description of the gauntlet..."  
  
__________________________________________________________________________________  
  
"This thing's actually pretty cool. I mean, it's light, comfortable, and looks all right, if a little gaudy. I just wish they had sent the other one too." Ranma spoke his thoughts aloud as he observed the gem set in the gauntlet's wrist.  
  
K stopped munching on his apple and swallowed before responding. "You know, it's probably got some kind of magic properties. You said it changed size on its own to match your hand, right?"  
  
Ranma frowned. "Yeah... so how do I tell what it does? If it does do anything, I mean."  
  
K looked up thoughtfully. "Well... do you have any magic powers?"  
  
Ranma shook his head. "Nah. I know a little more about it than most people, I guess, but I could never use that stuff. Takes lots of studying and junk, I've heard, and I don't have time for that."  
  
K nodded his tiny head. "Fair enough. I guess we should find someone who does know a lot about magic, though. And soon."  
  
Ranma shrugged and leaned back to rest his head on his pack. "I dunno. There's no rush."  
  
"Well, you know, some magical items have curses, or discharge powerful explosions and such depending on certain triggers, and some even have a mind of their own."  
  
Ranma blinked, and then slowly brought his right hand up so that it hovered just above his face. "A mind of its own? Seriously?"  
  
K nodded. "Yup. If that were the case, then it might contact you through telepathy and just tell you what it does. Or, it may decide you're unworthy of its power, and kill you right off the bat."  
  
Ranma blinked again. Then the fingers hovering immediately above his face twitched spontaneously. "Uh-oh..."  
  
K's eyes widened as the glove suddenly latched onto Ranma's face seemingly of its own accord, digging its fingers in around his cheeks and attempting to smother the young man.  
  
"MMMF!! MMMMMPH!!!" Ranma's other hand latched onto the rogue gauntlet, and managed to pry its thumb off of his jaw. "Help me!! Don't just sit there!! Help!! It's trying to-GMMMPH!!!"  
  
K immediately rushed into action, meaning that he started flapping his wings about in panic as he looked around wildly. "Somebody help! Somebody help! Somebody help! Somebody..." the metadragon began to trail off as he realized that Ranma's muffled screams had converted to uninhibited laughter, and he turned around suspiciously to see Ranma rolling on the ground while laughing and pointing at him.  
  
"Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!! Oh geez, I can't believe you FELL for that! Sucker!" Ranma trailed off chuckling.  
  
Had K any blood vessels in his skin, he would've been red from embarrassment. "You're an ass."  
  
Both of them calmed themselves quickly, and enjoyed a moment of silence in the open field.  
  
After moving through Beijing, Ranma had heard about some settlements in the distant mountain ranges that had managed to survive better than China's major cities. Seeing as he had nowhere in particular to head to next, he had decided to check the area. A treasure convoy as small as the one he had attacked couldn't have meant to go very far, so whoever had sent the convoy may very well have other assets in the area worth destroying.  
  
Ranma had chosen a small field hidden deep in the forest to stop and eat, and was simply waiting for K to finish his second apple before they started moving again.  
  
The tiny metadragon grumbled to himself as he began eating once more, but noticed Ranma's eyes narrow suddenly. "Hey man, what's wrong?"  
  
Ranma's expression didn't change, but he kept his gaze perfectly still and his voice low. "Somebody's watching us from the woods. Don't look around for them or anything, but be ready to fly away, got it?"  
  
K blinked, and lowered his head toward his food nervously, as if preparing to take another bite. "So are they bad guys, or what?"  
  
Ranma shrugged, still not shifting his eyes. "Who knows? Could be demons, or it could be a few little kids playing in the woods. Anyway, unless they attack us or something, just ignore it."  
  
{"Look! Look at him! Is he the one?"} The Amazon pointed excitedly at the figure beyond the rows of trees, looking back toward her companions.  
  
One by one, the other Amazons in her party raced to join their companion, and each peered down into the clearing.  
  
{"I don't know. Does he fit the description?"}  
  
{"Well, the elder said he was a 'tall man with black hair wearing a long coat and carrying a broadsword'. I guess it could be."}  
  
{"He doesn't look that tall. And he doesn't have a long coat. And that is NOT a broadsword."}  
  
{"I don't know, he's kind of tall. And he could've swapped clothes or swords any time."}  
  
{"Whatever, he's close enough, right?"}  
  
{"What do you mean, 'close enough'? If he's not the one we're looking for, then we'll just end up bothering some wanderer for no reason."}  
  
{"I meant that the description is vague enough that we can't just leave him here. *Sigh* It would really help if they had sent someone with us who actually knew what he LOOKED like."}  
  
{"Hey, is that a lizard?"}  
  
All the Amazon blinked at this, and then once again looked into the field.  
  
{"You're right! It is a lizard!"}  
  
{"I don't know about that. How many lizards do you know that have wings?"}  
  
{"Is it actually made of metal? At first I just thought it was a piece or armor or something!"}  
  
{"Hey, he's leaving!"}  
  
Ranma stretched as he stood up, then picked up his pack as he prepared to leave the area. As he suspected, this prompted the group that was watching him to emerge from the trees to face him. Whatever he expected, though, it wasn't four exotic-looking Chinese women carrying spears and scimitars, and he scratched his head in confusion.  
  
{"You! Stop right there! Are you the demon hunter?"} One of them shouted, jabbing her spear at him as if to indicate who she was speaking to.  
  
"Demon Hunter? What's she talking about?" K asked, giving his wings a few short flaps to lift himself up to land on Ranma's shoulder.  
  
{"Did that metal lizard just talk?!"} Another asked, clearly surprised.  
  
"Yeah, I can talk," K replied evenly, "and I'm NOT a lizard!"  
  
Ranma turned his head slightly to speak to his companion. "You speak Chinese?"  
  
"Don't you?"  
  
"Not really. I can say a few phrases, but I haven't been in China very long, so I can't understand a bloody word they're saying," Ranma admitted.  
  
K smirked. "Most species of dragon have a type of limited telepathy. We can understand any type of regular spoken language, as long as the speaker is actually trying to communicate normally."  
  
Ranma tried to think of why somebody would need to speak when they didn't want to communicate, and failed. "Well, whatever. They can understand you too, right? Ask them what they want."  
  
K turned toward the Amazons obligingly. "Did you lovely young ladies want something?" He asked smoothly, his beak curved into a pleasant smile.  
  
The Amazons blinked, shared a mutual glance, then shrugged it off and turned back toward their new translator.  
  
{"This man must come with us."}  
  
K turned toward Ranma and whispered in his ear. "Way to go, man! These girls want you to go with them!"  
  
Ranma blinked. "Why is that a good thing?"  
  
K blinked, then shrugged. "Well, they're pretty cute."  
  
"They have weapons, K." Indeed, they did, and by the way they were positioning said weapons, as well as the way they were surrounding him, they were prepared to use them as well.  
  
The metadragon sweatdropped. "You know, that's an excellent point..." he once again spoke to the Amazons. "Why exactly do you want him?"  
  
The lead Amazon frowned. {"We're looking for a man who was reported to be wandering these woods. We think your master might be that man."}  
  
K bristled a bit. "Master" indeed! "A man wandering the woods is a pretty vague description, don't you think? I mean, all it rules out is women, and maybe men wandering around the valley."  
  
The Amazons all fixed the metadragon with annoyed looks. {"If you must know, we're searching for a tall man with black hair, a long coat, and a broadsword."}  
  
K turned toward Ranma, a considering look on his face. Ranma stared back without a clue as to what was going on. He could understand K's speech perfectly, but his responses alone did little but confuse him.  
  
"Close enough. What are you planning on doing with him?"  
  
The lead Amazon twisted her wrist so that the spear head pointed up in the air, and then brought the butt of the spear down heavily into the ground. {"We will take him to our elder to confirm whether or not he is the one we were sent to find."}  
  
K cocked his head to side. "And if he is?"  
  
{"Then he will be married to our fellow warrior Comb!"}  
  
K blinked. Twice. That wasn't quite what he was expecting.  
  
He turned back toward Ranma and lowered his voice. "Go for it dude! Go with them!"  
  
Ranma looked at him curiously. "What'd she say? What do they want?"  
  
K shrugged. "They want to introduce you to their village elder and then hook you up with some girl."  
  
"What? Hook me up with... what's going on here?"  
  
"Don't worry about it man! They're going to take you to the village. That's where you want to go, right?"  
  
Ranma looked at the Amazon warriors uneasily, and they stared back stonily. "I'm not so sure any more..."  
  
K rolled his eyes and looked back toward the heavily armed women. "We'll go peacefully, but don't be pushy about it."  
  
Three of the four Amazon gave K annoyed looks again, but the leader smiled pleasantly. {"Good. It would be unfortunate if we had to hurt you."}  
  
"I don't know what she said," Ranma muttered as he began to follow the women into the woods, "but I don't like the way she said it."  
  
"Just take it easy, would you?" K chided, then stood up straighter on Ranma's shoulder, as if he was about to say something wise. "'The only thing better than a battle won is a battle avoided'."  
  
Ranma raised an eyebrow and stared at him. "Who told you THAT load of bunk?"  
  
"I dunno. Some old guy."  
  
__________________________________________________________________________________  
  
Cologne sighed wearily as she looked through her records, idly twirling a brush around in a dish of ink with her hand. Her other hand rested on a sheet of paper that contained the latest two deaths in the village.  
  
'If this keeps up, we may have to stop allowing our warriors outside the village. We certainly can't afford to start taking warriors away from the village guard,' she mused to herself. 'I just hope that the hunters I sent to find that swordsman return soon, even if they don't find him.' Cologne knew it was a mistake to send Amazons out into the forest during the current crisis the village was suffering, but Comb's family had a substantial amount of influence in the village, and simply wouldn't allow Comb's new husband to get away so easily.  
  
{"But their stubbornness could cost LIVES,"} Cologne muttered to herself, setting the brush down.  
  
*Knock* *Knock* *Knock* {"Elder Cologne? One of the search parties has returned with a prisoner!"}  
  
Cologne blinked, then whirled toward her closed door. {"Well, what are you waiting for? Bring them in, Child!"}  
  
Cologne's hopeful expression swiftly turned to disappointment as Ranma stepped through the doorway, K atop his shoulder and the group of armed Amazons following behind.  
  
"Hey, who are you calling prisoners?" K snapped at the lead Amazon, who ignored him.  
  
Casting a quick, curious glance at the metadragon, Cologne then spoke to the warriors. {"No, this is the wrong man. The swordsman was taller, had no pigtail, and wore a long coat and a BROADsword, not a katana."}  
  
The Amazons all immediately began muttering irritably.  
  
{"I TOLD you."}  
  
{"Oh, be quiet."}  
  
{"Maybe we can keep him anyway? He looks strong, and I don't have a husband!"}  
  
Cologne rolled her eyes. {"Maybe later, child. Though this isn't the right man, I suppose he was close enough to the description that your actions were understandable. Now go to the baths and freshen up. I want you all ready for guard duty tonight."}  
  
Ranma frowned as he watched the Amazons bow to what appeared to be a shriveled-up gremlin in a long robe, and then leave. He turned to K.  
  
"What's going on? What do they want with me?"  
  
"Nothing, looks like," K muttered, "you're not the one they were looking for."  
  
"Oh, okay." Ranma could hardly feel very disappointed to hear that. "So why do they have a sick little gremlin doing their bookkeeping? I thought those things were dumb as rocks."  
  
"Show more respect for your elders, boy," Cologne snapped, startling both of them, "and be more careful about what you say."  
  
Ranma blinked in surprise. "You speak Japanese?"  
  
"Fluently," Cologne stated simply, smirking at having caught the young man off-guard. "When you get to be as old as I am, child, you pick up a thing or two."  
  
"Wow, are you a human?" K exclaimed, "How old ARE you?"  
  
Cologne looked up at the metadragon and smiled. "I hardly think that my age would be anything worth noting to a dragon. My lifespan, as stretched as it is, would be but a blink of an eye to that of an immortal."  
  
K cocked his head to one side. "But I'm only twenty."  
  
Cologne sweatdropped.  
  
Ranma looked confused. "You're twenty? Years?"  
  
K nodded, "Well, as years are measured in Earth Realm, anyway."  
  
"Seriously? So are you a midget dragon, or what?"  
  
Cologne sweatdropped again.  
  
"Hey! I'm no midget! I'll have you know I'm pretty big for my age!"  
  
"As compared to what? A real lizard?"  
  
*Ahem!*  
  
Ranma and K stopped arguing as Cologne cleared her throat loudly.  
  
"Thank you. Now, I'm sorry we've troubled you like this, child, but now that it's over and done with, I'm going to have to ask you to leave. Joketsuzoku is going through a rather severe crisis right now, and I have little time to spare for strangers at the moment."  
  
Ranma blinked. "Crisis? What's up?"  
  
"Yeah," K added, "Why were you looking for this guy anyway?"  
  
Cologne looked up at them, annoyed, then sighed. "I suppose the least I could do for having troubled you is provide you with an explanation... very well. Recently, there have been a long string of murders in the area surrounding our village. A man claiming to be a demon hunter wandered to our village just yesterday, heard about the murders, and offered to destroy whatever was killing my people."  
  
Ranma nodded slowly, rubbing his chin. "So he went off to kill the murderer, and was never heard from again?"  
  
"No," Cologne said simply. "That's rather the turn of events I was expecting, but the young man seemed to have a knack for getting into fights, and inadvertently engaged himself to one of our more promising trainees, Comb. Upon learning what had happened, he fled."  
  
Ranma sweatdropped. "Okay... well, whatever. Do you know his name?"  
  
Cologne shrugged. "Comb does, and I'm sure she told me at some point, but I forgot. The whole thing is a waste of time for me; unless he still seeks to find the murderer, I really don't care whether they find him or not."  
  
Ranma nodded thoughtfully to himself. "So, what's up with this murderer?"  
  
Cologne looked up at him, an eyebrow raised. "Don't concern yourself with that, boy. You're still young. There's no reason for you to throw your life away."  
  
Ranma twitched as Cologne turned away. "Hey! Just try me!"  
  
Cologne turned back toward him, and saw that he now had his arms crossed, and an extremely determined expression. "*Sigh* All right, fine. What right do I have to protect some foolish wanderer from making a fatal mistake?" Ignoring Ranma's irritation, she turned away and clasped her hands behind her back. "68 Amazons have fallen to the attacker in less than a month. It is unknown whether the attacker is a human or a demon or whatnot, but we're certain that its attack patterns are fairly indiscriminatory; anybody, man, woman, or child, warrior, merchant, or farmer, is at equal risk when they leave the village. Luckily, whatever it is avoids the village itself, as there hasn't been a single attack at or within the outer walls."  
  
Cologne hopped up onto the table with her records, and turned so that she wouldn't have to crane her neck to look him in the eyes. "The few Amazons that escaped an encounter with the attacker all say that it was invisible, with only faint sound and a slight distortion in the air to indicate that anything was there at all."  
  
Ranma smirked. "A distortion? Like hot air coming from a stove, right? Well, then it's not completely invisible."  
  
Cologne smirked back. "That's what some of our warriors thought. However, whatever spell makes it transparent is more complex than that. Our wounded warriors say that the distortions were moving everywhere in strange and impossible movements, and they were struck from unexpected angles and directions. And Bath, who can sense a fighter's aura, said that strange energy was flowing about her so wildly that it was impossible to pinpoint the enemy. I assume it's a manner of advanced illusion spell, and I doubt that any of my warriors could see through it." 'Perhaps not even myself,' she added mentally.  
  
Ranma considered it for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders. "Well, I'll give it a shot. Sounds like a fair challenge."  
  
Cologne gave a cackling laugh, which caused Ranma and K to wince badly. "You're confident boy! I like that!" Her smiled then disappeared. "But there's a thin line between confidence and arrogance, sonny. This foe is beyond you."  
  
Ranma looked reasonably miffed at the accusation. "Oh? But I suppose it's not beyond this other guy that you found?"  
  
Cologne smirked. "That 'other guy' had a battle aura like a hellstorm, boy. He may not have even been human. I really don't think you could compete with someone like that, sonny, and I'd hate to have to order my warriors to go find another corpse to drag out of the forest. Give up and go home."  
  
Ranma's left eye twitched dangerously, and K looked uneasy as the pigtailed boy glared down at the shrunken village elder.  
  
"And... say I manage to destroy whatever's been killing your people. Do I get any reward?" Ranma did his best to smile congenially, but it just ended up making him look angrier.  
  
Cologne smirked again. "How about this: if you manage to kill it, you can bed any girl in the village that you choose."  
  
"You're on!" Ranma shouted, then turned away and stalked out of the hut, slamming the wooden door behind him.  
  
He continued stalking until he passed the two guards at the hut's entrance, and then suddenly froze. "Wait... what'd she say I'd get? A bed?"  
  
K sweatdropped. "Something like that, yeah..."  
  
"Well, whatever!" Ranma shouted, "I'll show that old bat!"  
  
"If this thing killed 60-something Amazons," K wondered aloud, "how are you going to kill it?"  
  
"I don't know," Ranma muttered irritably. "I'll think of something."  
  
"You'll think of something? After you're already fighting it?"  
  
Ranma stopped and frowned. "Well, sure. That's how I win most of my battles, really."  
  
K sweadropped. "Uh huh. Maybe you'd better quit while you're ahead."  
  
"Now don't YOU start too."  
  
__________________________________________________________________________________  
  
{"There, there, now. Let me see the wound... ah, yes, it's healing very nicely. That's a nasty scar you have there, but you'll fare better than most who've faced this phantom killer."} The healer smiled warmly at her patient, a buxom young woman with long purple hair. {"You've got an admirable constitution, Shampoo. Elder Cologne will be pleased to hear you've recovered so quickly."}  
  
Shampoo nodded somberly as she faced away from the other woman. Her blouse lay next to her on the bed, and her bare back revealed three parallel scars that ran down across her spine from her left shoulder.  
  
The healer began to dab some fluid onto the scars, and Shampoo's body trembled in response.  
  
{"Easy now... this stings a bit, but it will help keep the wounds from opening up again before they're completely healed."}  
  
Shampoo nodded again, and looked back toward the older woman. {"Will I be able to fight again soon?"}  
  
The healer raised an eyebrow. {"Well, I wouldn't recommend it, but yes."} the woman sobered, and then began to look uncomfortable. {"Um... I should tell you that they've made arrangements for Brush's funeral. You'll be more than well enough to attend, so-"}  
  
{"I will attend it,"} Shampoo said sharply, putting her blouse back on. {"And I'm hoping to be part of the hunting party afterward."}  
  
The healer looked distressed. {"Shampoo, you barely got out of the first hunting party alive. Brush and two others didn't, and Perfume isn't recovering nearly as well as you. Don't take this the wrong way, but I want to see as little of you as possible."}  
  
Shampoo sighed. {"This can't go on. Somebody must destroy whatever it is that's killing our sisters! If I don't do it, who will?"}  
  
The healer frowned. {"Well, there was that outsider swordsman, but Comb scared him away. I wonder what became of that..."}  
  
*Knock* *Knock* *Knock* *Knock*  
  
The healer turned toward the entrance, frowning. {"Oh no... coming! Coming!"}  
  
As the older woman left for the door, Shampoo fell backward to lay on her bed, and went back to brooding. A week in the healer's tent had given her plenty of time to run over the "battle" (slaughter was a more appropriate word), and she had come up with a few ideas, but none of them seemed particularly practical. Who was going to follow her into the forest carrying a barrel of colored dye or flour? She thought of simply training some more, but couldn't really see how that could help. When an attack could come from any direction, at any time, and with any manner of speed or power, how would regular training help?  
  
No, this enemy called for something unique. The Amazons had survived where the entire Chinese army had fallen because of the relative difficulty of even finding them, and the strength of their special techniques. However, nothing in the Amazon repertoire seemed suited to fighting invisible assassins.  
  
{"Shampoo?"}  
  
Shampoo looked up at the healer, startled. {"Yes?"}  
  
The healer looked confused. Confused, and a little weirded out. {"There's a man here to-"}  
  
{"I don't want to talk to Mousse,"} Shampoo spat, {"Send him away!"} Mousse had been badgering everybody of influence to try and get into the healer's tent while she was in there, and Shampoo had called in several favors to make sure he stayed out. The last thing she needed to deal with was that clueless moron drooling over her.  
  
{"Actually, it's not Mousse. I know you don't want to see him. There's another man here to see you."}  
  
Shampoo looked at the healer curiously.  
  
{"Well, not you in particular, but he said he's looking for someone who had fought the attacker. Well, HE didn't actually say that. He keeps speaking Japanese. And he has a talking metal lizard with wings on his shoulder that translates for him."}  
  
"For the LAST time! I am NOT a lizard!!"  
  
"Geez, chill out, would you? And don't yell in my ear!"  
  
The healer and Shampoo sweatdropped.  
  
{"Great. This is all I need,"} Shampoo muttered. {"I suppose I can talk to him."} The healer bowed, and once again made her way toward the entrance.  
  
The young man that came in was hardly what she expected (not that she had very much to base an expectation on), and did indeed have a small dragon on his shoulder that appeared to have metal scales. He was obviously a warrior of some type, as he was wearing light armor and a katana, both of which had obviously seen heavy use. There were also some other items on him that were harder to identify, but Shampoo pushed her curiosity to the back of her mind.  
  
The man smiled pleasantly at her. "K, could you introduce us?"  
  
"Is okay. Shampoo speak Japanese." Shampoo answered, startling the boy. "My name Shampoo. Who you?"  
  
Ranma blinked. "My name's Ranma. Ranma Saotome. I was just passing through, and I heard that your village was having trouble with a killer or something in the woods."  
  
Shampoo nodded, frowning. "Is true. So what you want?"  
  
He shrugged. "Well, I heard that it's invisible and all that stuff, but then I remembered that nobody told me where it usually attacks. So I was hoping you'd know where I could find it so that I don't spend days wandering the forest."  
  
Shampoo looked alarmed. "You want kill assassin?"  
  
Ranma nodded. "Well, that's the idea, yeah."  
  
"What you talking? You can no kill enemy alone. Is too, too dangerous!"  
  
Ranma chuckled. "Ah, it's all right. I do this sort of thing a lot. I'll take care of it."  
  
He stopped chuckling as Shampoo stood up, looking somewhat angry.  
  
"You listen me! Enemy is very strong! Kill Shampoo best friend! You go alone, you die too!"  
  
Ranma blinked, then sighed. "I'm... uh, sorry about your friend. But I'm not going to just leave or stand around with creeps like that loose! It's not right!"  
  
Shampoo turned away, and idly scratched her shoulder where her wounds were still healing. "You not help anybody if you dead. If Ranma wait, then Shampoo and others go too to help."  
  
"I'm with her, dude," K interjected, "I don't think you win by yourself."  
  
Ranma crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. "That's what the wyvern thought."  
  
K blinked. "Point taken."  
  
Shampoo frowned as she stared at the young man across the room. Did he say "wyvern"? It must have been some odd Japanese term she didn't know. The only wyverns she knew of were huge, winged pseudo-dragons that could rip scores of enemies apart before being killed itself.  
  
Ranma gave Shampoo his best smile. "So come on, just tell me where this thing shows up, and I'll be out of your way in-"  
  
"SHAMPOO!!!" *Crash!!*  
  
Ranma was up in a split second as the door flung open, his hand resting on the hilt of his katana. In the split second immediately after that, Ranma reflected that he had absolutely no idea what was going on, and that cutting open whatever was barging into the room would probably be premature.  
  
Ranma spent the next split second regretting his hesitation as he was enveloped in a tight and unnecessarily intimate hug by a tall young man wearing a white robe and with a pair of glasses atop his head.  
  
{"Oh Shampoo! I was so worried about you! Nobody would let me see you when you were hurt! It was horrible! Just the thought of possibly losing you has..."} Shampoo covered her face with her hands in mortification as Mousse continued rambling on loudly into Ranma's ear.  
  
K, who had been thrown from Ranma's shoulder from the sudden movement, flapped his wings rapidly as he hovered in the air above the surprisingly calm pigtailed boy. "Hey! What's going on here? Who is this weirdo?"  
  
Just a moment later, the healer rushed into the room from the entrance, looking as if she had taken a bad tumble in the dirt. {"Shampoo! I'm so sorry! But when he heard that you had a visitor, he forced his way in, and... uh... oh. I see your new friend is taking care of it."}  
  
{"Shampoo, did you gain weight? You seem a little bigger, somehow."}  
  
Ranma finally collected his wits, and spit out some of the man's long black hair that had gotten in his face. "I heard the name 'Shampoo' a lot. Is this a friend of yours?"  
  
{"What's that, my love? Why are you speaking Japanese? And why is your voice so low?"}  
  
Shampoo shook her head. "He not really friend of Shampoo's."  
  
"Then, would you mind if I hurt him?" Ranma asked seriously.  
  
Shampoo blinked, then smiled. "Shampoo appreciate that very much!"  
  
Mousse suddenly put three and three together and let go of Ranma before pulling his glasses down and staring closely at the pigtailed boy. "Hey! You're not Shampoo at all!"  
  
Ranma smiled. "Congratulations, Sherlock!" *POW!!!* His fist glowed blue briefly as he slugged Mousse right in the middle of the chest, and the entire room shook from a sudden explosion of force before the myopic fighter was blasted across the small room and into the opposite wall.  
  
Mousse shuddered mightily, then emitted a pathetic whimper before he fell to the floor, leaving a splintered indentation of his body in the wall.  
  
The healer raised an eyebrow. {"Impressive. This one might be a catch, Shampoo."}  
  
Shampoo blinked, and then scratched her chin in consideration.  
  
"So what's up? Who is this dweeb?" Ranma asked irritably, glaring at Mousse's twitching form.  
  
"That just Mousse. He have very bad eyesight, so he mistake people for Shampoo all time." 'And various animals and objects,' she added mentally.  
  
Mousse immediately shot to his feet. "Shampoo! What are you doing here with this outsider?! Look at how dangerous he is!"  
  
"Dangerous?" Ranma pondered aloud, "Yeah, I guess I can be dangerous when guys come out of nowhere and grab me intimately."  
  
"Don't you mock me!" Mousse shouted, turning to point a finger at the healer. "You keep your filthy hands off my Shampoo!"  
  
"Hmmm... either I hit him too hard... or not hard enough," Ranma mused.  
  
"Either way, you should probably hit him again," K suggested.  
  
"What you want Mousse?" Shampoo asked tiredly, "Shampoo have no time waste on you."  
  
Mousse adopted a determined expression as he stepped up to a potted plant in the far corner of the hut. "Shampoo, I have made a decision! I cannot stand to sit in my home comfortably knowing that some bastard has harmed your heavenly body! I will hunt down the murderer that terrorizes our village, and put an end to him!"  
  
Shampoo rolled her eyes. "You go to forest and get killed. And then Shampoo have to attend other funeral, because you go get killed for Shampoo. Even if you used to fighting enemy no can see, you no can beat this enemy."  
  
"No Shampoo!" Mousse insisted, "I will NOT lose! With love in heart and passion in my fists, I will slay the phantom assassin, and bring his head back to you as a trophy! And then at last, everyone will know the depths of my love for you, and we can be married!"  
  
"Is this guy for real?" K whispered into Ranma's ear.  
  
"I feel like I'm in some kind of sick Friday night sitcom," Ranma mumbled back.  
  
Shampoo sighed wearily. "Mousse, even if you kill assassin, Shampoo still not marry you." She paused, frowning at him. "But if you insist fight, then you go to large flower grove next to river south of village. That where assassin attack most."  
  
"Really?! Do you mean it?!" Mousse asked, excited beyond words. "Then I'm off, my love! I will avenge you, I swear it!" Without another word, he turned around and ran.  
  
*Wham!!*  
  
"Door's about three meters to your left, man," Ranma provided.  
  
"Ow... thank you..." Mousse rubbed his nose painfully, then backed up and made the necessary adjustments. "I'm off, my love! I will avenge you!"  
  
*Wham!!*  
  
Ranma sweatdropped. "You'll have to open the door, too."  
  
"I knew that..." Mousse mumbled, staggering. Remarkably, it only took the dazed and mostly blind warrior two more tries to successfully exit the hut from that point, likely because of the healer's assistance.  
  
As he was gone, Ranma turned to Shampoo. "So what's the deal? You wouldn't tell ME where to go! Do you think that guy has a better chance than I do?"  
  
Shampoo shook her head. "Mousse have no chance, but would go no matter what Shampoo say. Shampoo not really care, anyway. He not Shampoo's problem."  
  
Ranma blinked, then looked toward the exit worriedly. "So... you're not going to go after him?"  
  
Shampoo shrugged. "Shampoo go later. Somebody have to pick up stupid Mousse body. You want come then?"  
  
Ranma frowned at her apparent apathy, and looked back toward the exit. Then he took one last look at Shampoo before turning and heading for the exit himself.  
  
"Where you going?" Shampoo asked in concern. He wasn't really going after Mousse, was he?  
  
"Well, I know where to find the killer, so I have no reason to wait, do I?" Ranma shrugged. "Besides, even if the guy's a moron and a jerk, I'll save him if I can."  
  
"Wait! You no go yet!"  
  
Despite her protests, Ranma walked straight out of the hut, and then immediately turned south, his companion metadragon matching his pace while flying behind his head.  
  
Shampoo sighed and fell back onto her bed.  
  
{"I don't understand Japanese well at all, but I can guess that we're not likely to hear from him again."} The healer spoke, approaching Shampoo with a bowl of soup.  
  
{"It's a shame. He looked rather formidable. A horrible waste for him to die trying to help Mousse."} Shampoo took the soup and began to slurp it down.  
  
{"Then again, Mousse is likely going to die trying to help you."}  
  
Shampoo swallowed and put the bowl down. {"'Avenge', not 'help'. And I'm not even hurt permanently."}  
  
{"Point. Still, it's a noble thing for him to do."}  
  
Shampoo just shrugged and went back to her soup, ignoring the older woman's slightly hopeful expression.  
  
{"...... It really is a shame about that other boy, at least. He was quite the handsome one."}  
  
{"He won't be for much longer,"} Shampoo muttered irritably.  
  
The healer stared at Shampoo for a moment, then sighed and took the empty bowl. As she turned away, however, she noticed that Shampoo had fixed her gaze on the door.  
  
Smirking slightly to herself, she took a wet rag from her shelf and began scrubbing the bowl clean. Then she replaced the rag and dropped the bowl in a bucket of hot water before turning back to the bed.  
  
{"Shampoo, I'm going to..."} She stopped talking, and chuckled softly to herself. The cot was empty, and the door was open.  
  
{"She's a good girl. I have a feeling this is going to turn out well."}  
  
__________________________________________________________________________________  
  
Ranma jogged quickly through the trees, weaving under and around the closely interlocking branches and brush with such dexterity that the thick foliage didn't serve to slow his pace much at all.  
  
"You're lost, aren't you?"  
  
Ranma twitched as K dipped down from above the tree-line momentarily to speak to him. Ironically, despite the metadragon being able to fly, he wasn't nearly as agile as the young martial artist, and would've been left behind otherwise.  
  
"No, I'm not lost! Well, not really. I'm trying to find a place I've never been to before, so it's expected that I'd get a little sidetracked, right?" Ranma jumped up into a particularly tall tree, and then began making his way by jumping from branch to branch and rebounding off tree trunks. While certainly slower than his previous method of travel, it allowed him a better view of his surroundings, which he needed if he was to find the river.  
  
"Well, we could have followed one of the paths. If there's a river around here, they have to have a path to it." K reasoned.  
  
Ranma frowned as he reached a particularly tall tree, and then leaped up to the highest branch that would support his weight. "Well, I was thinking bird's flight, you know?"  
  
"You just weren't thinking, were you?" K offered, smirking.  
  
Ranma gave him an annoyed look. "Be quiet before I swat you. If you have nothing better to do than make fun of me, make yourself useful and look for a river."  
  
K nodded sharply and then shot upward with a powerful flap of his wings, rising well above the treeline.  
  
"I see it!" he shouted, "A little to your right, and then just head straight!"  
  
"Stupid lizard coulda told me that earlier... he was up there the whole time..." Ranma mumbled softly enough so that the metadragon couldn't possibly hear, and then launched himself back down to continue running through the forest at top speed.  
  
After a few more moments, Ranma left the thick foliage behind and beheld the small river that had carved its path through the mountains. It wasn't very wide, and looked like it would only come up to his waist at the deepest part. On both sides of the river were narrow strips of grassy land that were bereft of larger plant life, likely because of people continuously traveling this way.  
  
"Okay... so now what?" Ranma muttered, scratching his head. "Let's see... she said the grove was south of the river... or was it the south river, and the grove is... uh..." Ranma sighed.  
  
"Aiyah! Ranma!"  
  
Ranma blinked in surprise as a high-pitched voice called out to him, and then turned around to see the purple-haired girl from before rushing up to him, holding a pair of brightly colored maces in one hand while waving with the other.  
  
"Uh... Shampoo, right? What are you doing here? I thought you were injured."  
  
Shampoo frowned at him. "They not let Shampoo go because wound not full heal yet. Shampoo can still fight. Shampoo no want to go, but you ignore Shampoo and follow stupid Mousse."  
  
Ranma sighed. "Look, if you don't want to help, then you can go home, you know. Nobody's making you come, and nobody's going to blame you if I get killed or whatever."  
  
"Ranma no be rude. Shampoo only come from goodness of heart," she replied, turning her head away pointedly.  
  
While the two fighters were arguing below, K hovered overhead, smirking at the sight. It was SO obvious the girl had a crush on him.  
  
The metadragon's thoughts were momentarily distracted from a distant flash of light, comparable to sunlight reflecting off of metal. And once he had turned around and gotten a more focused look at the area, he realized that that's just what it was.  
  
"Well, if you might get in trouble for being here and you don't WANT to be here, why are you here?" Ranma asked in frustration, rubbing his head.  
  
"Stupid! Who else show you way? Shampoo only try help!" she snapped back a bit irritably.  
  
"Yo! Can we save the lover's quarrel for later?" K shouted.  
  
"What?" Ranma asked, totally confused. Shampoo merely gave the metadragon a flat stare to show she wasn't amused by the comment.  
  
"There's a fight goin' on thataway!" K shouted, momentarily pointing a wing downstream while flapping the other one more quickly to try and stay aloft. "I think we've found our murderer!"  
  
Shampoo blinked and looked in the direction of the grove she had spoken of, which was, of course, the direction K was pointing. The path was marked quite conspicuously with a dust trail, which also noted Ranma's swift progress toward the battle.  
  
"Ranma! You wait!" Shampoo shouted uselessly, before herself taking off at a sprint toward the fight. She sincerely hoped that this outsider was truly as skilled or ingenious as he was confidant; following a near-total stranger to her death while she was supposed to be recovering from battle would be a rather moronic way to be remembered.  
  
To an extent, Ranma did slow down, but only enough so that Shampoo would be able to immediately follow up any attack he made upon reaching the battle. If he did in fact end up way over his head, he wanted to assure that she'd still have time to get away.  
  
Within moments, Ranma burst into a particularly large clearing the cut into the wall of forest, his hand on the hilt of his katana.  
  
Ranma blinked, then dropped his guard and stared. The grove had seen better days. The large mound that seemed to decorated with various species of attractive flowers was now littered with blades. In fact, the entire area seemed to have been struck by a metal whirlwind of sorts. Chains littered the ground, throwing knives and axes were embedded in every tree, spears were stuck in the ground at sharp angles, and Ranma noted that three of the weapons that were thrown around the field had blood on their edges. Suprisingly, standing in the middle of this whole mess was Mousse, breathing heavily, and holding a machete in one hand and a sickle in the other. He sported many thin, but bloody gashes around his arms, torso, and shoulders, and Ranma had to guess that a number of the strikes had been aimed at areas of the neck and face, but missed by various measures. The man's glasses lie on the ground next to him, the lenses shattered, and the fellow seemed to have trouble with his leg as he stood. Ranma then noticed the considerably large cuts on his leg, which were partially hidden due to the robes the young man wore.  
  
Most incredible of all, however, was that, lying before the nearly blind fighter, in a pool of its own blood, was a short, malevolent-looking humanoid creature with metal claws attached to its wrists. It was covered from head to toe in dirty-looking bandage wrappings, with a featureless metal mask covering its face, which in turn had three uniform-looking holes over the mouth and both eyes. The cause of its expiration was quite obvious, and could be fully attributed to the scimitar that had impaled its neck.  
  
"Lucky shot?" Ranma murmured. K gently flew over him and settled on his shoulder, looking distracted and thoughtful.  
  
Mousse slowly turned toward Ranma, his breathing labored. "Sha... Shampoo?"  
  
Ranma quickly jabbed a thumb behind him, where Shampoo stared at the scene mutely. "Back there, buddy. I wouldn't want to have to hit you again. It could kill you at this point."  
  
"SHAMPOO!!!" Mousse cried, and then dropped his weapons and stepped toward the beautiful Amazon. The moment he put pressure on his injured leg, it buckled and he collapsed on his face, hurt but still conscious. "Shampoo! I've done it! I've really done it! I killed the bastard demon! Look!"  
  
"Is wonderful," Shampoo muttered, a little impressed despite herself. She had really expected Mousse to die. "So what you do? You just throw enough weapon around random until kill demon?"  
  
Mousse grinned and tried to struggle to his feet, to no avail. "And it WORKED!!"  
  
"Actually," K interrupted, snapping out of his thoughtful state suddenly, "I just remembered; that's not actually a demon at all. It's called a jakku, which means 'ghost butcher' in some old language. It's actually a type of undead." Ranma nodded thoughtfully at that, and began looking more closely at the blood pooling around the immobile corpse.  
  
"Well, whatever," Mousse snapped, annoyed at the interruption, "now it's REAL dead! And now we can be married, Shampoo!"  
  
Shampoo rolled her eyes and stepped past Mousse, much to the young man's confusion and despair. "What Shampoo tell you, stupid? Shampoo no marry you! Shampoo glad you kill assassin, but no that glad."  
  
"But Shampoo!" Mousse cried, still trying to get to his feet, "This proves I'm the most able and courageous warrior in the whole village! I've taken on the phantom killer, and WON!!"  
  
"That's great," Ranma interjected, turning toward the master of hidden weapons. "Now what are you planning on doing about the rest of them?"  
  
Mousse blinked. "What?"  
  
"Oh, it's really quite simple," Ranma explained, crossing his arms over his chest. "I suspected it since I heard what that old mummy from the village said about energy everywhere and distortions in the air surrounding the fighters. It seemed to me that there was probably just more than one, rather than one with a really effective invisibility spell. This proves it." Ranma pointed to the field, and Shampoo, Mousse, and K all followed his gaze. "Check it out. Just looking around, I see three weapons with blood on them, and from each of these, there's a thin red trail leading away from it. None of the trails head towards this dead guy over here, and other than being impaled through the neck, he doesn't have a scratch on him." Ranma then pointed a single finger in the air, looking smug. "As none of the trails intersect, there's probably at LEAST three more of those out here."  
  
As Mousse and Shampoo stared in growing unease at the scene (not that Mousse could see if Ranma was telling the truth, but he believed him anyway), Ranma nodded to himself in satisfaction. Shampoo readied her bonbori and started scanning the ground, looking for the blood trails that Ranma had spoken of. Finding one that started from the edge of a throwing knife, she quickly followed it around the circumference of the grove, eventually tracking it to a small spot of red hovering in the air... directly behind Ranma.  
  
By the time she had opened her mouth to shout a warning, however, Ranma already had his hand on his katana.  
  
*SHING!* The sharp noise of steel being drawn was followed by a silver flash, and Ranma turned full circle back toward the Amazon almost lazily as a wash of blood sprayed to the side.  
  
*Thump* Two halves of a body slowly faded into visibility as they fell to the ground, resembling the first one perfectly to the extent that the one Mousse had killed had merely been impaled, rather than sliced in two.  
  
"That's two down," Ranma said happily, "Now search for those weird hazes in the air! They'll probably try to surround us and come from behind!" Ranma suited actions to words, and quickly located one such, distortion, sporting a nick from a shuriken, trying to lunge at him. Ranma hopped back while slashing with his katana in a wide arc, and was rewarded with a light gash on the attacking jakku's chest. While the wound didn't appear to fell the zombie assassin, or even slow the creature very much, it DID appear, which made the following strike that lopped off the jakku's head that much easier to aim.  
  
Shampoo simply made as wide a block as possible with her twin bonbori, trying desperately to predict the movements of the seeming cloud of heated air before her. The scraping of cloth against dirt alerted her to sudden movement, and she thrust one mace forward in a blind counterattack.  
  
*Thack!* *Srak!* As metal claws raked against the mace that was still guarding, her other weapon struck something in the air, and during the impact Shampoo glimpsed what she thought could very well be the creature's shoulder.  
  
With that orientation in mind, Shampoo kicked into what would then be it's abdomen, and was rewarded as a body of medium weight went flying from the blow, impacting heavily with a tree. Seizing a convenient sword that was laying about her feet, she flipped it up with her feet into her waiting hand, and then threw it at the stunned jakku. She was rewarded again as the sword pierced flesh and then dug into the tree, blood oozing around the blade from a wound invisible to the human eye.  
  
The jakku, like its dead companions, began to fade into existence as its revived body ceased functioning, and Shampoo resisted the urge to cheer as the metal mask eventually slumped forward in true death.  
  
"DUCK!!!"  
  
Shampoo hit the ground immediately at Ranma's shout, and the pigtailed boy's katana flashed above her.  
  
The fourth jakku's arm twirled through the air, leaking spirals of blood as it flew to eventually rest right next to Mousse, who was still struggling on the ground.  
  
*Shlick* Ranma pierced the jakku's chest (using the bloody dismemberment wound to judge where the rest of the creature was), pushing his katana into the invisible fiend up to the hilt. Then he thrusted his blade upward, freeing the sword while leaving a quite fatal gash up through the jakku's shoulder. The zombie assassin wobbled back and forth as it slowly fell to the ground, its lifeblood raining onto the grass.  
  
Ranma shook his katana a few times to shake the blood off of it as Shampoo got up unsteadily.  
  
"Well, that takes care of the ones we KNOW are here. Now for the others." Ranma grimaced.  
  
Shampoo hoped he was joking, or just being pessimistic, but a slight sound far to her right informed her of a presence unknown to her eyes.  
  
With resolve in her eyes, Shampoo took a defensive stance toward where she thought she heard the noise; any other indication that she could locate the enemy was pretense, as she couldn't even make out any distortion in the air that she couldn't easily attribute to tense nerves.  
  
"Ranma?" She began, and the pigtailed fighter straightened, wondering what she wanted to say at a time like this. "Shampoo just want you know... you is great warrior. If Shampoo die, Shampoo glad go by you side."  
  
Ranma blinked in surprise, and turned toward her in curiosity.  
  
"Geez, how depressing," K muttered, hovering in the middle of the grove, hopefully out of reach of the jakku.  
  
"Shampoo? What about me?!" Mousse cried.  
  
"If Shampoo die, she ashamed to die standing over you useless carcass!"  
  
"But Shampoo!"  
  
"Focus, people, focus! Life-or-death situation here!" Ranma reminded them, turning again toward the wall of trees.  
  
Thinking back to what he had heard the elder say, he remembered that one of the fighters had supposedly detected some kind of energy that allowed her to detect them. Ranma himself could detect auras easily enough, but for him it was a danger sense, alerting him to anything powerful enough to be a threat in the area. Beyond actually detecting that something WAS there, he had never developed the skill beyond that level of simplicity, always having been able to simply see his foes.  
  
Now, however, seemed a good time to put the idea to use. Ranma took a deep breath, then slowly closed his eyes as he reached out with his mind. His own aura started to grow slightly, and Ranma fought back a bit a vertigo as his mind was bombarded with hazy images and feelings that he was used to only during fleeting moments. At once the haze of energies that he was detecting began to sharpen, but Ranma soon found that he had to sort it out himself.  
  
To that end, he felt a sudden disturbance in the flow of energies, and his eyes snapped open.  
  
"Whoa!" Ranma flipped backward onto his hands, and then flipped back again to land on his feet. He was quick enough so that he not only avoided being eviscerated, but he also saw three glowing streaks of green cut through the air where his neck had been. The energy quickly dissipated, but not before Ranma could make an accurate guess as to where his opponent was.  
  
Shampoo turned as Ranma shouted out, and then saw a series of green streaks slice through the air, similar to the ones that she had barely glimpsed when they had cut into her back nearly a week prior.  
  
Ranma, however, flipped away from the attack, and then launched himself headfirst into a tackle that slammed firmly into the remaining jakku. Not only that, but while still in the air, Ranma had withdrawn a dagger from somewhere, and stabbed it into the undead killer before kicking it hard into the ground and then landing neatly on his feet maybe a meter away.  
  
Then, with a smirk that simply added insult to injury, Ranma drew his blade to cut down the final attacker as it made a desperate bid to escape. Unfortunately for the jakku, its invisibility was severely betrayed by the prominent knife hilt sticking out of its chest, and the undead beast fell quickly before Ranma's swift blade.  
  
Ranma sheathed his katana, looking rather proud of himself, when he was suddenly grabbed in an excited and totally unexpected hug.  
  
"Ranma! You kill assassin! Is amazing!" Shampoo smiled at him almost reverently, and the pigtailed boy began to blush and stammer.  
  
"Well, uh, yeah. I mean, it was nothin', really. Ha! Piece of cake! Um, you can, you know, let go now, if you want." He swallowed deeply as Shampoo tightened her hug, and began to wonder if she had any plans of letting go.  
  
"Aw, how about that," K teased, fluttering over to the couple and then landing on Ranma's head. "The big, bad demon slayer is shy!"  
  
"He's also quite short-tempered," Ranma reminded him irritably.  
  
"So... this is how it is... I see it all now!"  
  
Ranma, K, and Shampoo all shared a blink, then looked over to Mousse, who had been mostly forgotten during the greater part of the fight. The boy was slowly rising to his feet, and his eyes held such fury that K fell back behind Ranma's head to peek over Ranma shoulder.  
  
"You see it all? See what? You can't see anything!" Ranma reminded, both confused and not a little annoyed. This was his moment, after all, and even if Shampoo was making it a little uncomfortable (if not at the same time pleasurable), this guy was just plain ruining it.  
  
"Ha!" Mousse shouted, standing up straight finally, "My vision isn't the best, outsider scum, but what makes you think I can't see what's right in front of my face?!" He challenged, pointing a finger across the grove.  
  
"Well, for one thing, you're talking to the jakku impaled against the tree," Ranma pointed out helpfully.  
  
Mousse's finger twitched, and then he turned toward the voice. "Don't you mock me! I can see it plain as day! You're trying to steal my Shampoo from me!"  
  
"'Trying'?" K questioned.  
  
Ranma ignored the matadragon and put up his hands peaceably. "Whoa, whoa, you've got it all wrong, man!" Then he sweatdropped and looked down at Shampoo, who was snuggling against his chest. "Doesn't he?"  
  
The buxom Amazon girl frowned at this, and then adjusted her position so that she was hugging Ranma's arm rather than his torso. While this had the regretful effect of keeping her from rubbing her body against her savior's, it allowed her to more effectively berate her myopic tormentor.  
  
"Mousse be quiet! Shampoo never belong to you!" She shouted angrily.  
  
"But don't you see?" Mousse protested, "he's blinded you with... with his... uh..."  
  
Ranma looked thoughtful. "My superior ability to kill things that piss me off?" He guessed.  
  
"Yeah!" Mousse shouted, "Can't you see? The swine admits it! He's trying to trick you into falling in love with him!"  
  
Once again, the two humans and dragon across the clearing sweatropped. "I don't quite follow the logic here," Ranma ventured uneasily.  
  
"Mousse finally lose mind," Shampoo supplied, sighing and holding herself to Ranma's arm even more tightly. Then she smiled up at Ranma. "But Ranma no mind be with Shampoo! Yes?" When he didn't answer, she took a better look, and realized that his expression had changed drastically, going from confused and irritated to completely serious and determined.  
  
Mousse tried to step forward, but nearly collapsed the moment he tried to move his injured leg. "D-Damn you! I... I can't fight you right now, but as soon as I can, you'll fall before..." Mousse then noticed Ranma's mostly perplexed expression turn suddenly serious. "... uh, fall before... um, well, what I meant to say was, uh..."  
  
Suddenly, Ranma wrenched his arm free of Shampoo's grip, and then launched himself toward Mousse, who promptly panicked. "Hey, wait! You can't fight me now! I'm injured! Oof!" To Mousse's surprise, rather than being cut with a katana or hammer-fisted, Ranma grabbed him around the waist and then sprung to the side.  
  
*Thrak!!* A huge metal claw cut deep into the ground where Mousse had been standing before, throwing up dirt and rock in a heavy spray.  
  
Ranma landed lightly, and deposited Mousse safely (if not softly) a good distance away from where he had been before.  
  
"Well, it looks like we've got one more of these freaks to take care of!" Ranma cracked his knuckles and grinned.  
  
K, who had been thrown off of Ranma from his sudden movement, decided to land on Shampoo instead this time. "What the? That's not a jakku! There's no way one of those things could carry something that heavy!"  
  
They all stared at the metal talons as they remained embedded in the dirt, connected to a chain as it was that seemed to disappear as it led up into the air.  
  
Ever so slowly, the chain began to go taut, and the claw was roughly dragged from the rut it had made in the ground.  
  
Ranma gently drew his sword, and let his senses stretch out toward the area before him. He had a feeling K was right; though this new attacker "felt" the same way the others did, it was just... more. Like a mountain lion compared to its kittens.  
  
"Shampoo, I want you and Mousse to get back to the village. You'll be safe there." Ranma said absently, strafing slowly as he kept his invisible foe pinpointed.  
  
Shampoo gasped. "Ranma! Shampoo no-"  
  
"Just do it, will ya?!" He shouted back, annoyed. "I don't have time to argue with you!" At that moment, a loud snap broke the relative calm of the grove, and multiple heavy crossbow bolts phased out of nowhere, streaking toward the martial artists.  
  
"Run! Now!" Ranma slapped one of the bolts out of the air with his left hand, and then dashed forward. A slight motion of its aura seemed to indicate that it had moved in response to this, so rather than a straight forward slash, Ranma jumped up right before making contact and somersaulted in the air, cutting in a sawblade motion that scored an admirable nick on some part of the creature's body, presumably its shoulder.  
  
Shampoo had hit the ground as the bolts streaked overhead, and had watched as one hit a fairly thick tree, turning the stricken section of trunk to splinters as it continued on to embed itself thickly into the next one. That had left her sufficiently wary of being collateral damage that she accepted Ranma's command. Stopping only long enough to grab Mousse by the back of his robe, Shampoo quickly shouted, "Shampoo wish you victory, Ranma!" and then took off toward the village proper as quickly as she could while dragging Mousse on the ground behind her.  
  
Ranma took a one-legged stance as he waited for his enemy to turn toward him. Or maybe it wasn't turning toward him. Or perhaps it already had?  
  
"Screw it. These invisible creeps aren't worth the trouble." Ranma blasted forward with all the speed he could muster, and then spin-kicked his opponent before following up with a horizontal slash. As blood gushed from the eerie-looking wound, Ranma moved to follow up with another kick, only to get struck hard in the chest. As he was flung back toward the river, Ranma reflected upon how his crude mastery of detecting auras hadn't allowed him to tell anything more than his opponent's location, general power level, and a few other miscellaneous things that he really hadn't sorted out in his mind yet. Really, if he wanted to fight this thing on a level that didn't involve him being smacked around every once in a while, he would either have to render it visible somehow... or simply fling massive quantities of energy at it.  
  
Ranma barely touched the ground with his hand while still airborne, and within moments had landed lightly on his feet. "Well, looks like it's time to play hardball," Ranma muttered, and his aura began to build around him.  
  
Very soon Ranma found that channeling his own power disrupted his senses to the point that he could no longer concentrate on detecting his enemy's aura. An inconvenience, but hardly a danger at this point.  
  
"All right, freak," Ranma said, holding his arms back behind him. His battle aura, normally blue, suddenly changed color to red, and a wash of energy began to swirl about Ranma's feet and stir up the dirt. "Flash fire!" Ranma swept both his hands forward, and his aura coalesced into a blaze of red that blasted across the ground and blasted violently into a large form just a few meters away.  
  
A freakish howl echoed through the mountain forest, and as the red ki cut fiery gouges into the Earth below, Ranma got his first good look at his new opponent. It was at least eight feet tall, and, like the jakku, wore bandage wrappings and a metal mask. Unlike the jakku, this creature's bandages were sparse, wrapping fully around the feet and ankles, chest, arm, and a few other small bits here and there. Covering certain areas such as the breast and groin were metal armor plates, each one rusted and scarred with wear. What wasn't covered revealed deathly pale, grossly muscular flesh thick with veins, and, more recently, burns. The only other notable difference between this monstrosity and the undead assassins before it was that its left hand had been replaced by the same metal talons that had nearly nailed Mousse in the back before. Mounted on its other hand was a powerful-looking crossbow.  
  
Of course, this was all lost on Ranma, who was more focused on clearly noting where his enemy was. The pigtailed boy grinned.  
  
"If you can see it, you can hit it..." his right hand lit aflame with the light of his aura, the black plates of Ranma's new gauntlet shining with the otherworldly light.  
  
"If you can hit it..." Ranma clenched the fist tightly, and the energy was suddenly sucked into the glove, giving it a light blue glow, despite its previous hue of crimson. The gems set in the back of the hand and wrist flashed like light bulbs.  
  
"You can KILL IT!!" Ranma launched himself forward, twisting while in motion to avoid a three-bolt volley of crossbow bolts. Within a split second, he was within reach of the foul zombie, and had cocked his fist back. "Drago-Whoa!" Ranma stopped suddenly and threw open his gauntleted hand before staring at it oddly. "That's weird. This thing's affecting the ki flow somehow. Uh..." He looked up at his opponent, who was barely two feet from him. "Sorry, can I start over?"  
  
*Whoosh!* Ranma ducked under the talons that sought to cut him to bloody ribbons, and then jumped straight up and backflipped over the following backhand before landing on exactly the same spot he had been standing before.  
  
"Thanks!" Ranma said, and then cocked back his left fist, which was already glowing. "Dragon fist!!"  
  
*KAA-SHRAAAK!!!* A massive fireball in the shape of a dragon's maw instantly formed and tore into the undead beast, and Ranma's knuckles impacted with a force that blew the ground out from under them and sent the monster flying back in an ashen heap.  
  
Ranma had propped one foot behind him to handle the recoil, and he shook his smoking hand as the red energy surrounding the blast site dissipated, a satisfied smirk on his face.  
  
He was stood in the origin of a great fan of burn marks that had streaked across the Earth below him, and great ruts of dirt had been torn up and thrown about from the actual impact of his fist and the creature's chest. Looking at the creature, not much was left of the afflicted area, and the mass around the gaping hole in the zombie's torso was quickly burning up.  
  
Ranma nodded happily. "A job well done."  
  
"All right! That was awesome!" K shouted, flying up to land on Ranma's head. "How come you didn't tell me you could do that? I didn't know you could do that!"  
  
Ranma smirked up at the little dragon, and began to walk back toward the village. "I can do a lot of stuff you don't know about."  
  
"Well, tell me!" K insisted, "I want to know all the cool moves you can do!"  
  
Ranma raised an eyebrow. "Why?"  
  
"So I can shout advice from the sidelines, of course."  
  
"That's more like what I DON'T want," Ranma said dryly, "I'm not some kind of Poke`mon."  
  
K blinked. "What's a Poke`mon?"  
  
"It's like you, but they fight, and conveniently fit into little metal spheres when you want them to stop bothering you."  
  
"Are you calling me a bother?" K challenged.  
  
"No, no, no," Ranma denied, "you're not important enough to be a bother. I was thinking more like 'annoyance'."  
  
The bickering continued until long after they had entered the forest.  
  
__________________________________________________________________________________  
  
Reaching the village had been something of a surprise to Ranma. It was kind of late, so he had expected the village to be mostly boarded up and asleep, with a heavy guard that he may well have had to talk or sneak his way past. He had been planning to simply walk to the elder's hut, make the old wench eat her words about him not being good enough, and then get on his way out. Maybe, if anybody was still up, he would purchase some supplies first.  
  
What he didn't expect was for every torch or piece of wood that could be fashioned into a torch to be lit up around the village area, and for Amazon men and women to be dancing on the palisade walls and such. A look further down the path into the village proper revealed people parading through the huts with huge plates of food and jugs of wine.  
  
"What is it, Christmas?" Ranma wondered aloud, scratching his head. He didn't think it was December. It was more towards August, right?  
  
Ranma was treated to a light smack in the head from a metal wing. Not that K had bothered to make it light, but honestly, the tiny dragon wasn't very strong. "No dope, this is your hero's welcome!"  
  
Ranma blinked. "Hero's welcome? You're kidding me. Naw, this has gotta be some kind of holiday or something." In his experience back in Israel, a hero's welcome consisted of perhaps a medal or ribbon, followed by one of the other soldiers (typically the one whose ass he had saved) buying him dinner or treating him to some other gift. Beyond his service in the Israeli armed forces, most battles he won either earned him money, his life, or fear. Most of the trouble similar to what the Amazons had experienced were solved with bounties and bounty hunters out in the wastes, and thus he was given no more than he expected to receive (and, on a few spectacularly unpleasant occasions, significantly less). Of course, he often performed deeds of good will that had no offered reward attached, but these were usually isolated events that garnered some small gratitude or favor with someone of no influence or significance. Not that he minded, but it had left him totally unused to feasts being held in his honor.  
  
The whole reason for celebration was confirmed when the very same group of young women that had first escorted him to the village suddenly poured out from behind the palisade wall and began to drag him into the village while chattering excitedly in Chinese. Ranma allowed himself to be dragged, and looked quizzically at K. The metadragon just shrugged, and didn't even attempt to interpret the buckets of praise being dumped on the boy in a language he didn't understand. Ranma's ego was big enough as it was, really.  
  
After being led into the village square, Ranma found himself shoved into a large seat at a table with a plate settled in his lap. Well, that, and he found that some of the girls had taken to grabbing him in rather intimate places. Blushing slightly, Ranma settled down and began to eat from the plate in his lap.  
  
The music around him began to build, and Ranma saw Shampoo make her way toward him through the crowd.  
  
He waved to her. "Hey Shampoo! Over here!" Ranma grinned as the beautiful warrior began rushing towards him. "Can you believe it? Everybody's throwing me a party!" Ranma laughed a bit, embarrassed at the whole scene.  
  
Shampoo, for her part, simply smiled and seated herself on the armrest of the chair before she busied herself stroking Ranma's arm gently. Ranma was clearly a bit confused as to why she was doing this, but found it pleasant enough that he wasn't about to complain.  
  
"So, uh... Shampoo, how's Mousse doi-mmmph..." his question was involuntarily muted as Shampoo suddenly kissed him deeply, wrapping her arms around his head and sliding slowly down into his lap (the plate of food that had previously occupied the space was knocked away, and quickly forgotten).  
  
K grinned from where he had settled to eat some roast at the main dinner table. "Damn Saotome! You work fast, don't you?"  
  
Ranma doubtless would have produced a witty and scathing comeback, but his mouth was already quite occupied with Shampoo's tongue, and at that, unable to form a proper response. Not that it would have been in his best interest, anyway.  
  
"Enjoying yourself, sonny?"  
  
Ranma was startled out of his surprise, and broke the kiss to face Cologne, who had snuck up behind his chair. "THERE you are! You owe me an apology, old ghoul!"  
  
The Amazon elder smirked at the young man who was even now holding her great-granddaughter in his lap. "Oh, do I?"  
  
Ranma smirked back. "Yeah! Sayin' I wouldn't stand a chance against those invisible freaks... well I took down three of 'em, plus a really big one that showed up later!" Shampoo giggled as he stared down at the old woman arrogantly, and brushed and hand through his hair adoringly.  
  
Cologne chuckled. "Yes, well, you sure showed this old bat a thing or two, didn't you?" She hopped up onto a bench, and then took a drumstick from a convenient plate of meat. "When you're a pessimist, it's always a delight be proven wrong."  
  
"So is all this really for me?" Ranma asked, trying to ignore Shampoo as she began snuggling against him. He had no idea what had gotten into the girl, but couldn't find it in his heart to complain.  
  
Cologne took a bite of her drumstick, then swallowed and turned towards the boy. "Tonight was supposed to be a funeral for Shampoo's friend Brush and four others that were stricken down by these 'jakku' that Shampoo described to me. Instead we got the opportunity to push that grim date back so that we may celebrate the deaths of their killers." She waved the drumstick in his face. "It's been many months since we've had anything to celebrate, Ranma. Once it was deemed safe to leave the village freely, many of the farmers that have fields a fair walk from the village were more than happy to bring back enough for a celebratory feast."  
  
Ranma nodded. "Okay, I just have one question though..." he pointed across the village square, "do you guys normally let lizardmen into your village?"  
  
Cologne and Shampoo blinked, not having expected that at all. Both turned to where he was pointing, and saw an unusually tall figure in a brown cloak off to the side of the square, clearly separate from the festivities taking place.  
  
Cologne turned back toward Ranma. "Yes, actually. We've adapted to the... changes the world has undergone in the past several years better than many other locales. Creatures of all types sometimes pass through our village to purchase supplies or food, and we see no reason to stop them. Of course, they're always watched carefully, and we have enough swords on hand to make any troublemakers regret their coming here." She paused. "Why?"  
  
Ranma shrugged. "No reason, really. It's just that that one keeps glancing over at me. No big deal."  
  
Cologne shrugged as well. "If that's over with, then..." She suddenly grinned. "I suppose you'll be wanting your reward, eh? And from the looks of things, you already have someone in mind, eh?" Shampoo snuggled up tighter against her savior, sighing in delight.  
  
"Oh, uh, about that..." Ranma started, pushing himself up straight in his chair so he could see over Shampoo's head. "Look, I know I won and everything, but to be honest, I was just trying to prove something. You can keep the bed."  
  
Shampoo and Cologne blinked.  
  
"I mean, really, I wouldn't even know what to do with a new bed anyway. I travel everywhere, and it's not like I can just bring a new bed with me, and... uh... what?" Ranma trailed off and scratched the back of his head as Shampoo and Cologne stared at him oddly.  
  
Over at the dinner table, K snickered.  
  
Cologne hummed to herself as she observed the pigtailed boy's confusion, and then suddenly snapped her fingers. "I'll tell you what, child. Simply enter the home I share with my family over there... yes, that one, and then I'll have Shampoo prepare a little treat for you, okay?"  
  
Ranma blinked, then grinned and stood up. "Sounds good!" With a spring in his step, the pigtailed fighter jogged down the length of the village, dodging dancing villagers and drunken warriors along the way. K watched the pigtailed boy go, then swallowed up the last of some potatoes before quickly taking off after him.  
  
Cologne watched him go, and then turned to her great-granddaughter. {"I see you already have your eye on him, child. You would mind escalating that relationship, would you?"}  
  
Shampoo shook her head happily. {"Ranma is very strong and kind! He'll make a perfect husband!"}  
  
The elder nodded slowly. {"Certainly, Shampoo. We'll work on that tomorrow. For now, would you mind settling for 'lover'?"}  
  
Shampoo grinned and shook her head again.  
  
{"Excellent!"} Cologne cheered, grabbing up another drumstick. {"You know what to do, child. Go to it!"}  
  
Shampoo nodded happily and skipped off to her family's hut.  
  
{"Elder! Elder! Elder Cologne!"}  
  
Frowning at the voice, Cologne turned to see the healer, the same one who was originally assigned to watch over Shampoo, push her way through the crowds toward her.  
  
{"Child, calm yourself. What's wrong?"}  
  
The healer looked embarrassed, and lowered her head. {"S-Sorry elder. But... um... I thought you might want to know... er..."}  
  
{"What is it child? Spit it out, now."}  
  
The healer sighed. {"You know how you told me to keep Mousse restrained in bed for the evening?"}  
  
{"...... Oh, no......"}  
  
__________________________________________________________________________________  
  
K chuckled as he crawled along the wooden floors of the elder's house. "Man, you are SO gonna get laid!" Looking up at the boy, the metadragon noticed that he wasn't even listening, instead looking at some scrolls he had found in a bookcase. "Hey, should you be touching that sort of thing?"  
  
Ranma ignored him, and continued scanning down the Japanese translations alongside the complex Chinese text. He had no idea why someone had thought to include a Japanese translation, but he was glad they had. This stuff was pretty interesting.  
  
"Hmmm... tie a boulder up with a rope... hang the student on the other side..." he muttered softly to himself as he memorized the training technique. Apparently the technique it taught allowed the user to destroy rock formations with a single touch of the finger. Of course, that made its use against living targets practically nil, but there was plenty use for a technique like this regardless.  
  
Finishing with that scroll, Ranma quickly rolled it up, then selected another from the ornate bookcase and carefully unrolled it.  
  
Muttering a bit himself, K looked around the house as he stood at Ranma's feet. It was sparsely decorated, but those few baubles that were displayed were certainly more than he had seen around the village in other areas.  
  
"Shoving your hands in a fire? Yeesh. Why do all these Amazon techniques involve mutilating yourself?" Ranma once again replaced the scroll, and then picked up another. Truth be told, the methods, though painful, didn't seem very strenuous. Certainly he had been through worse in mastering the Hyoken School of the Dragon's Flame.  
  
He was just reading through the next scroll, and learning about how cold air inside a spiral of hot air could create a vortex, when he felt a tugging on his leg. "Not now, K."  
  
"Ranma... code red!" the metadragon whispered harshly.  
  
Ranma looked down to stare at him oddly. "'Code red'? What the hell does that-SHAMPOO! Hi!" With such movement that he was a blur, Ranma had put the scroll back and whirled around, a nervous twitch in his eye and a sweatdrop on his head. "Hey! I didn't see you there! I was, you know, just looking around! And certainly not stealing your tribe's secret techniques! Ha ha!" He said all this so loudly that even HE could tell it was a lie.  
  
Shampoo just giggled and walked up closely to him so that she could wrap her arms around him. And she quickly did so, before kissing the surprised boy softly on the lips.  
  
Ranma initially just put his surprise aside and allowed himself to enjoy the moment, but quickly came to his senses and gently took Shampoo by the shoulders before pushing her away. "Whoa, whoa... uh... look, Shampoo, not that I don't like you and everything, but I think this is moving kinda fast, don't you think?"  
  
The buxom Amazon simply stared at him oddly, wondering if she had done something to ruin the mood.  
  
"Uh, well, I mean, we hardly know each other! And I'm gonna be leaving soon, so..." Ranma trailed off as Shampoo took his hand in hers and smiled up at him.  
  
"Shampoo show you something, okay?" Not waiting for a response, she started pushing him back into a room, and Ranma saw no reason to resist.  
  
K started to waddle after them, but Shampoo quite deliberately entered the doorway quickly and shut the door before the tiny dragon could get inside.  
  
The metadragon blinked rapidly, then shrugged and curled up outside the door.  
  
Hoping that the couple on the other side of the door wouldn't make too much noise, K was about to fall asleep when a shadow fell over him, cast against the dim lights of the oil lamp hanging from the hall ceiling.  
  
K looked up at what formed the shadow and gulped. "Uh... hi."  
  
__________________________________________________________________________________  
  
Ranma looked about nervously at what was clearly the interior of a bedroom. "Uh... Shampoo, like I was saying, you're a really nice girl and all..." He trailed off as she turned away from him and moved her hand to the tie on the back of her dress.  
  
Ranma wasn't exactly chaste or anything, but always felt exceedingly guilty when a girl pressed her affections for him, only for him to leave her the next day. Of course, the only ways to circumvent this was to either reject their affections (which didn't always work), or simply settle down with the girl (which might happen once he was cold and dead). Ranma really hoped that Shampoo wasn't taking this very seriously.  
  
The Amazon undid the tie, and then slowly slid off one shoulder.  
  
Ranma blinked, and then leaned forward as he saw the three prominent marks that made their way across her back from her shoulder. "Whoa... that's a heckuva scar."  
  
Shampoo nodded slowly, not facing him. "Jakku make scar when attack and kill Shampoo friend and fellow warriors. Wound bleed more than normal, and Shampoo almost die." She smiled slowly, though Ranma couldn't see it. "Then Ranma come and kill jakku, and save Shampoo."  
  
"And Mousse," Ranma added, hoping that maybe mentioning the boy would help to defuse the situation. The fellow really seemed to turn her off, after all.  
  
When Shampoo shoved off the other shoulder, and her dress fell to the floor, he was forced to confess to himself that it didn't work.  
  
"Wh-Whoa! Hey! Slow down, girl!" Ranma laughed nervously, and nearly choked himself as he swallowed involuntarily.  
  
Shampoo giggled and slinked toward him seductively. "Why Ranma so shy all of sudden?"  
  
"That's not true," Ranma protested, pointing a finger in the air as if lecturing. "Really, I'm always shy. But it doesn't really come out much until some girl strips naked and starts advancing on me."  
  
Shampoo giggled again and prepared to pounce on her prey.  
  
Unfortunately, the sensual union between the two teenage fighters was simply not to be, and fate decided to cut in with the help of a mentally unbalanced man and a 20-pound battleaxe.  
  
*Smash!!* The door was reduced to splinters as the heavy metal head crashed through it, and Shampoo whirled around to see Mousse hunched over the mighty weapon, seething in anger.  
  
Ranma sighed. "Now THIS I should have seen coming. Still..." he looked away, ignoring the stare of murderous rage Mousse was giving him. "... there's something missing..."  
  
__________________________________________________________________________________  
  
Comb sighed as she took a sip of wine from her gourd, and shifted to make herself more comfortable leaning against her spear.  
  
She didn't really mind being given guard duty on the night of a feast, so long as she still got to eat and drink at least a little bit. The reasons for her depression were of a more complex nature.  
  
{"So they never found your husband, eh?"} Her companion guard murmered lightly, trying to start up a conversation.  
  
Comb shook her head. {"No. But at least all the search parties came back alive."}  
  
The other guard grinned. {"Plus they brought back that other outsider, if the rumors are to be believed."}  
  
Comb snorted. {"This feast could have been in Rayden's honor, but instead Shampoo gets to hang off that other fellow's arm as..."} she trailed off and looked around cautiously. {"Do you feel that?"}  
  
Her companion blinked. {"Feel what?"} Then she felt it too. A faint, constant vibration in the ground. {"What's that? Do you think it's an earthquake?"}  
  
Comb frowned. {"I don't know. The vibrations are building, though. It feels like-"} she stopped speaking suddenly as a small mound of Earth emerged from the forest and quickly made its way toward the village, leaving a trail of disturbed dirt in its wake.  
  
Comb stared at the trail as the dirt hit the palisade walls, and seemed to stop there. Then she went through the village gate to look at the other side. Sure enough, the trail continued along toward the village square at the same speed.  
  
Her companion followed her gaze, then turned toward her. {"I didn't see anything if you didn't."}  
  
{"Deal."}  
  
__________________________________________________________________________________  
  
Ranma hopped to his feet and smiled warmly at the homicidal teenage across from him. "So, who wants to talk this out like civilized human beings?"  
  
Ranma leaned to one side as the battleaxe whizzed by his head. *Chung!*  
  
"Okay then. Diplomacy: failed. Guess it's time for a little armed conflict." Ranma began cracking his knuckles.  
  
Shampoo glared hatefully at Mousse, holding a sheet over her with one hand. "Mousse, you go now! Shampoo never forgive for this!!"  
  
"No, Shampoo, I. WILL. NOT. GO." His voice was deadly serious, and caused Shampoo to pause in surprise, even if Ranma just rolled his eyes. "Shampoo, I care about you too much to let this DESPICABLE WORM desecrate your body!! I'll protect you forever, even from yourself if need be!!"  
  
Shampoo began to tremble in barely controlled anger.  
  
Ranma shrugged. "That's actually kinda noble of you... sort of... but I'm still gonna have to kick your ass. No hard feelings, right?"  
  
*K-shing!* Mousse flexed his hand, and a fan of blades appeared in it. "I don't hold grudges against the DEAD!!" The Chinese fighter launched himself forward, cutting wildly with the steel fan in a series of arcs that sliced into the target with surprising efficiency, if not unremarkable lethality.  
  
"But you do hold grudges against clay pottery?" Ranma questioned, eyebrow raised. Apparently being angry enough to kill hadn't improved the boy's ability to identify his enemies.  
  
Shampoo covered her face with her free hand, mortified.  
  
Mousse became even angrier than before, if possible, and slowly turned toward the blur in his vision that had spoken.  
  
"Hey! Who do you think you are, stepping on me like that?!" Mousse was suddenly and unexpectedly accosted by a flying metal dragon, who made his irritation known by beating his steel-like wings in Mousse's face.  
  
"Ow! Hey! Cut that out! Ouch!! That stings! Those things are sharp! Oof!!" The last noise was made not because K was slashing his face, but because Ranma had walked up to him and kicked him in the stomach.  
  
The pigtailed boy crossed his arms over his chest, and K landed on his shoulder, the both of them glaring down at the visually impaired fighter.  
  
"Normally I would give some kinda heavy-handed moral statement about respecting women and not bothering them and stuff," Ranma started, "but really, I'm not feeling that self-righteous right now, and I'm kinda tired." He shrugged, and then turned to leave.  
  
*Rrrrrrrumble...*  
  
Everyone present blinked as the house began to shake from the sudden vibrations.  
  
"Well, that's rarely a good sign," K remarked.  
  
He was right.  
  
*KA-KRROOOM!!!* *CRASH!!!* Much of the wall, and a good portion of the ceiling was ripped apart as a massive armored head emerged from the ground below, tearing apart everything above as it made its way heedlessly through the surface.  
  
"SHRRYAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!" A tremendous roar echoed through the mountain valley, momentarily hiding the sudden shouting and panicking that was coming from the village proper.  
  
The beast that was causing all this fuss was a massive serpentine creature, with a snake-like body covered in dark, horny, segmented armor plates. Its head alone was nearly half again as tall as Ranma was, and twice that in length. It was supported quite sturdily by a muscular body, that was hardly much smaller than the head.  
  
"Well, that's just great... a wyrm," Ranma mumbled, dusting himself off. The creature's emergence had caused quite a lot of dust and debris to fall around him.  
  
"It's a black wyrm!" K shouted, gaping.  
  
"It looks more like a dark gray to me."  
  
"THIS IS NO TIME TO BE ARGUING ABOUT THE COLOR OF ITS HIDE!!"  
  
Ranma nodded in determination, even as the massive beast overhead slowly tensed its muscles to strike.  
  
He turned to Shampoo, who was lying on the shattered floor, paralyzed with shock, and holding up a towel to her breasts as her only meager protection. "Shampoo, I'm going to need you to get out of here until its safe, okay? I'm not completely sure, but I think this guy's after me."  
  
*SMASH!!!* The wyrm's head shot forward towards Ranma, and it tore easily through what was left of the bedroom wall as more of the elder's home fell to pieces around it.  
  
Ranma landed lightly on one side of the pseudo-dragon. "Yup, it's after me. C'mon K, we'd better get outta here." He jumped out of the convenient new hole in the ceiling and ran into the crowd of confused and shaken warriors that had surrounded the house. He still needed to get his pack, which he had left at the healer's hut.  
  
__________________________________________________________________________________  
  
"By Athena!" Cologne shouted, staring as the huge wyrm ripped its head up through the roof of her house, sending the tile roofing raining down upon the village proper. "A wyrm?! I haven't seen one these since the Death March!" Cologne grimaced mightily. "What could one of these be doing here? It doesn't make sense to send one alone..." Wyrms were commonly (and the word is used loosely, for even psuedo-dragons were hardly common) used to assist armies in sieges. Not that they weren't practically an army by themselves, but without a force behind it to take the village or finish razing it, there seemed no reason for the beast to be attacking.  
  
That's when Cologne noticed that the wyrm seemed to be scanning the wreckage of her house, as if searching for something. But of course, sending a wyrm to retrieve a certain object, or kill a single person, seemed even more preposterous than one simply passing through and attacking. Whoever had sent it obviously had a lot in the way of power, and nothing in the way of subtlety.  
  
She was about to start shouting orders to the warriors that surrounded her home, when a shrill whistle attracted everyone's attention; including the wyrm's.  
  
Ranma stood atop the outer palisade, waving at the black serpent. "YO!! YOU LOOKIN' FOR ME?!?! OVER HERE, YOU OVERGROWN EEL!!!" Grinning, the boy leapt over the other side of the wall and took off for the forest, going at a fair jog.  
  
The wyrm's eyes narrowed, and it gracefully threw its head back as it slid back into the Earth. Immediately a mound of displaced dirt began to move through the village, causing Amazons to scramble out of the wyrm's path.  
  
"What the hell is that boy doing?!" Cologne shouted to herself, scowling. It took one skilled man to kill a few assassins, but it took a small army to down a pseudo-dragon of any type!  
  
She tapped two Amazons on the shoulder with her staff, and each of them turned, and bowed when they realized who it was.  
  
{"Child, I want you to go to the armory and retrieve the mithril arrows that soap forged. Go, child!"} The Amazon quickly ran off, not even slowing to confirm her compliance.  
  
{"And as for you,"} Cologne began, addressing the other woman, {"I want you to go to the village cellar, and bring me back as much as possible of the most potent wine we have."}  
  
The warrior blinked. {"Elder?"}  
  
{"Just do it girl!"} Cologne snapped. *Sigh* {"I'm getting far too old for this..."}  
  
__________________________________________________________________________________  
  
"Okay, so what's the plan?" K asked as he sped along above his companion martial artist, flying between webs of branches and leaves.  
  
Ranma himself as jogging lightly through the foliage and clearly taking his time in avoiding any particularly dense cluster of foliage. "Well, I was thinking that I'd keep going for a little while, and then stop if I get to an open field or something."  
  
K blinked. "Okay... then what?"  
  
"Well, then I kill it," Ranma said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.  
  
K's eyes widened. "WHAT?? We're going to FIGHT it?!"  
  
"Of course not," Ranma scoffed, "You're useless in a battle. I'm going to fight it."  
  
The metadragon gaped for a moment, then sped up to perch firmly on Ranma's head.  
  
"So... are you going to use that C-4 again, like you did with the wyvern?"  
  
Ranma raised an eyebrow. "That's actually a good idea, but I'm all out, so I can't."  
  
K sweatdropped. "You know, if we survive this, we're going to have to kill that ego of yours, before we're the one's who're killed."  
  
Ranma rolled his eyes. "Yeah, whatever... WHOA!!!"  
  
Ranma stopped running immediately and killed his momentum, causing K to lose his tentative grip and go flying forward.  
  
Of course, the metadragon was perfectly capable of flying, so K experienced no major discomfort besides being tossed. And a quick look down revealed why Ranma had stopped so suddenly.  
  
Less than two inches from the wall of trees that formed the beginning of the forest, the ground dropped into a nearly vertical cliff that outlined a rather deep valley.  
  
The valley was so deep, in fact, that K had to squint a little bit to make out the small springs that dotted the valley bottom.  
  
"Not good... not good... not good..." The metadragon continued the mantra out loud as Ranma tossed his pack to the side and turned away from the cliff.  
  
K turned as well, once he heard Ranma cracking his knuckles. "You're crazy! You can't fight it here! You'll be knocked off the edge! ...... If you're lucky..."  
  
Ranma's face was a mask of utter seriousness. "I've gone too far to die here, K. I'll make it. Just keep yourself safe, all right?"  
  
"B-But... But Ranma..." K began, unsure of what to say.  
  
*Rrrrrrumble...*  
  
"Here it comes!" Ranma shouted, sighting the moving trail of dirt that marked the wyrm's movements. His hand moved to his katana's hilt as the beast approached underground... drew the sword slightly as it passed underneath him... and then sheathed it again in confusion as it passed by him.  
  
*Ka-kroom!* "RRYAAAAAaaaaaarrrrgh......"  
  
Ranma and K sweatdropped as the snake-like body of the worm burst out of the face of the cliff, and was immediately subjected to the harsh, merciless grasp of gravity.  
  
*Goosh* The tremendous splash that the mighty creature no doubt made in one or more of the pools below had faded to a bare whisper by the time it echoed up to Ranma's ear, and the pigtailed boy scratched his head in contemplation.  
  
"Huh... the stupid animal must've tried to overtake me, and just busted through the vally wall instead. Ha!" Grinning, Ranma walked aside to pick up his pack.  
  
K peered into the valley below, squinting. "Is it just me, or did the wyrm's body disappear? I can't see it."  
  
"Who cares?" Ranma said, slinging his pack over his shoulder. "We should get moving. We need to head north."  
  
"North?" K asked, "why? Aren't we going back to the Amazon village?"  
  
Ranma snorted. "Naw. After getting rid of the wyrm, they might try to crown me king or something. I'd rather just move on."  
  
K shrugged and perched on Ranma's shoulder as the fighter began to make his way back into the forest. "It's too bad... that girl Shampoo had it BAD for you."  
  
"Quiet you. For something so small, you sure have a dirty mind."  
  
"Aw, you're just a prude."  
  
"Stupid lizard."  
  
"Moron!"  
  
"Iron-headed dinosaur!"  
  
"Arrogant jerk!"  
  
Ah, friendship.  
  
__________________________________________________________________________________  
  
"Sir is very lucky that I see come out of spring. Not many people here; sir would have hard time find out about curse." The guide looked across his small fire to the wet little rabbit that sat there, its ear twitching slightly.  
  
It was rather odd; he had found the rabbit outside the Spring of Drowned Rabbit, looking so confused and frightened that he had thought it obvious that somebody had somehow gotten into Jusenkyou without his knowledge and fallen into the spring. Then again, when he had picked up the rabbit it had tried to bite him, and the little creature didn't seem to fully comprehend human speech. It had seemed to jerk in recognition of a few Japanese words, however, so he had settled on that language. The poor fellow (or lass) sure was acting strangely though; he had explained the curse in its entirety, but it still looked worried and scared, while not giving any particular attention to the pot of water he had set on the fire.  
  
Speaking of which...  
  
"Here you are, sir. You go back normal now!" Smiling reassuringly, the guide picked up the kettle and splashed the rabbit with it.  
  
".................. Aiyah... sir... you very bigger than I thought..." The guide simply couldn't think of any other words to express his thoughts as he stared into the giant eyes of the massive, 60-ton warbeast before him.  
  
"Reeeeeeaaaaaaarrrr..." The wyrm let out a deadly-sounding hiss as it reared its head up. It wasn't entirely sure what was going on, but it was hurt and confused and it was going to take out its stress on this pitiful little creature!  
  
*Splash* The guide looked down at the little bunny rabbit as he replaced his cup in his waist pouch. "Sir, I recommend you go like that. Not scare villagers so easily, yes?" Smiling amiably, the guide turned away from the rabbit, ignoring as best he could its violent and confused thrashing.  
  
It was for the best, really.  
  
**********************************************************************************  
  
End Chapter 2  
  
Author's Notes:  
  
I would like to take this time to apologize to the Poke`mon fans out there for the glaringly obvious continuity error present in the previous reference to Poke`mon. As far as I am aware, the Poke`mon craze didn't pick up significant momentum for one such as Ranma (who would obviously have no particular interest in it, because he's not a geek like you guys) to know what it is until the late 20th or early 21st century.  
  
Obviously, this places the peak of Japan's popular kid's show right in the middle of the war that devastated all of the eastern world. Needless to say, I hardly think it reasonable for you to suspend disbelief to the point that you imagine shiploads of anime leaving Japan, and coming back loaded down with troops and armor for the defense of Tokyo against demonic invaders. Nintendo stuff, sure, but not Poke`mon merchandise.  
  
Realistically, Poke`mon wouldn't even have become popular in Japan, as a conflict of such importance and scale surely would have disrupted normal commercial entertainment. However, at the same time, it's simply too good a joke for me to erase, so I'm going to leave it in there. Doubtlessly I have offended you with this callous mistake, but I'd simply like you to know that I'm thinking of you. If you're still thinking about sending that flame, I'd also like you to know that I have friends that can hack your home address from your e-mail address, and that when people complain to me, their houses have a tendency to accidentally catch fire. 


	3. Conflicts

Hybrids: Finding the Ultimate Warrior  
  
[The topic of genetic cross-breeding is, quite understandably, a topic upon which very few scholars encroach.]  
  
[For mortal species, it is largely a matter of their mortality. A human usually finds it difficult to harness the resources necessary to force creatures of worthwhile ability to breed with those not of their species, and even if successful, the natural process involved can take many years, of which most mortals cannot afford to waste. So naturally, such time and resources are directed elsewhere.]  
  
[For the noble races, it is mostly a matter of sanctity and "ethics". Angels and elves especially view their people, and therefore their blood, as sacred and pure. Typically, cross-breeding with any other social class, never mind species, is heavily discouraged in those species, and to mate with a creature of dark or bestial origin, such as a demon or werewolf, would be to call a death sentence upon oneself and any created offspring. Likewise, the thought of forcing other species to mate, and lacking any means of doing it artificially, makes many of these beings rather squeamish, especially if the breeding creatures themselves possess any significant intelligence (which I have found is crucial to create successful hybrids). It should be noted that all hybrid geneticists before me that were of any worth were all evon.]  
  
[And of course, my demon brethren, as usual, stand as the least likely to excel in any manner of scientific study. I have witnessed some of the works of Methraine and Toltiermon, but those two, while brutally efficient and decisive in their work, lack the greater patience required to truly explore this sadly underestimated field.]  
  
[It is well-known among commoners that certain creatures can interbreed. An elf can produce a child with a human, or an angel, or an evon. A fire troll can mate with a wind troll. So on, and so forth. However, I had seen precious little of more radical cross-breeding. Understandable, as creatures that are very different in biology don't usually wish to breed, but it still intrigued me.]  
  
[This essentially leaves ME as the greatest hybrid geneticist in all of 284 different realms (At least two-thirds of those do not possess intelligent creatures, but I am still rather proud of the achievement). While this leaves me with a quite palpable sense of excitement as I commit to my experiments, it also brings significant frustration, as I have no one's mistakes and observations to compare to my own. However, I have made significant progress.]  
  
[Subject #171 was my first spectacular success. A half-ice troll, half-devil, though the devil aspect is clearly dominant. I found that while the troll aspect had very few advantages over the devil aspect, and even cut #171's inherent magic capabilities slightly, it gave him a constitution far greater than that of either species, and the devil aspect seemed to enhance the healing and strength advantages of the troll to an unexpected degree. I called him Tio, and after devoting more time to his upbringing, the devil hybrid has become a loyal companion both in battle and in the labs.]  
  
[I made some minor successes early on, about the time surrounding Tio's creation. Subjects #47, 192, 502, 506, and 621 come to mind. Those were a flame imp/manticore, devil/human, angel/human, arachidia/human, and wyrm/krisu, respectively. Out of these minor successes, a definite pattern began to emerge.]  
  
[Many have given up the idea of cross-breeding wildly different species of animal because of a small natural flaw that they had taken as an absolute reproductive limitation. Two species with vastly different genetic structures are supposedly incapable of breeding, and even when they breed successfully, they produce infertile offspring. Of course, a few magic circles and clever spells ensure that offspring will be conceived, significantly heighten the chances of a complete genetic overcross, resulting in a stable and capable reproductive system, and can eliminate the problem of having two very different species that are essentially unwilling to breed (though there were still some issues with the actual physical act involved. I'm still not completely certain how that human managed to effectively impregnate an arachidia, though I'm certain he lost his ability to impregnate anything after that). Unfortunately, forcing a hybrid very rarely yields even decent results; very often the products of these pairing are little better than horribly malformed versions of the parent, usually the one that possesses a stronger magical aura (perhaps because of a reaction to the magic circles).]  
  
[The pattern I noticed was that humans yielded the highest number of successful, healthy hybrids. While these creatures' powers are usually diluted from the human blood, and thus weaker, they are certainly healthier than the multitude of useless blobs that have emerged from the loins of many fully demonic pairings. A correlation was quickly apparent when I also confirmed that humans had the highest rate of successful impregnation without having magic to assist in fertilization (many of them still needed magic to assist in the performance of the breeding itself). Humans tended to preserve many of the "stronger species'" primary traits, though they inevitably suffered the above mentioned dilution, while usually increasing basic intelligence. Astounding!]  
  
[However, this still left me with a burning question: are humans good only as a catalyst? While humans make more successful breeding partners, usually the hybrid created is less powerful than the creature that bred with the human. What then, is the point? I have created very few amazingly successful pairings that produce creatures superior to both its parents. I was just about ready to dismiss humans as a worthwhile subject for my experiments; after all, if the sum of the parts is worth more than the product, what would be the point? Better to try and fail with many other creatures and hope for a miracle such as Tio than create inferior results.]  
  
[Today, that has all changed. The villages south of Maeron forest here on Talbeern have been the center of much strife recently, and as usual I've been poking about and snatching what resources I can in the confusion, while manipulating the villages so that I can isolate the great library in the southern castle and take it for myself. That hardly seems important now.]  
  
[On a trek over the forest, I noticed a bleeding figure carrying something through the trees. An initial scan revealed that it was one of those cursed blood angel wenches carrying a child, and that she was near death. The blood angels were of significant interest to me at the time, so I shielded the area, laid a few protective spells, and dipped down to "help". Of course, there was nothing I could do to save the mother, but having a baby blood angel to observe was a gift I could not have been happier with.]  
  
[The baby did not have any wings, however, much less the scarred, bladed bone wings of the blood angel tribe. It turns out that the child was a blood angel/human hybrid! And not only that, but one of significant initial power! What few tests I have managed to conduct before I reached my logs have all revealed an odd conflict within the traditional blood angel curse, as well as a connection to the sword that the woman carried, which I shall study later.]  
  
[The woman was very accommodating to my needs, and actually pushed the child on me before I could kill her and take the baby boy. Then she died. I brought her body along for dissection and experimentation, but she failed to yield anything interesting.]  
  
[As I write this, I'm almost giddy with excitement! This boy, "Rayden" as she apparently named him, will be an amazingly valuable addition to my experiments, and one that I did not have to create myself. I look forward to the many log entries I'll be making on this particular subject.]  
  
- Entry #3643 of Doppler Thaeramon's personal scientific journal  
  
Nexus II  
  
by Black Dragon  
  
http://www.angelfire.com/anime5/fanficlair  
  
I'm not infringing on any copyright laws! Uh uh! Nope! La la la la la! I can't heeeeeeeeeear you!  
  
As usual, words in " " are in the language primarily being spoken, or are presented phonetically, {" "} are languages other than the one primarily being spoken, ' ' are thoughts, * * are sounds, and [ ] are writing.  
  
Chapter 3  
  
Conflicts  
  
**********************************************************************************  
  
She was the guardian of this forest, and her mission was a simple one: keep demons out of the sacred forests.  
  
True, she had only watched over these trees for but a few years, given the relative recency of demon-kind's return, but she was as dedicated to her cause as any of her brethren who had been at work for millennia.  
  
She was a high dryad, a mystic of the trees, and for four years she had been guarding this forest in China, killing any dark creature that dared to encroach upon its fertile grounds. The intelligent creatures she warned first, but very few of them (being demons) listened.  
  
Today, that very scene was being played out once more in front of the lake on the forest's edge. The dryad stared down imperiously from where the massive collection of tree branches twisted together before melding into her torso, staring down at the pathetic wretch that dared to approach these holy grounds.  
  
"I am warning you: leave this place at once, or your life is forfeit! Go!"  
  
The man she was staring down at sighed and began to massage his forehead. "Of all the stupid, worthless..." he trailed off mumbling, then took a deep breath before looking back up at the tree mystic.  
  
"All right, look here wood-for-brains, I'm gonna tell you ONE LAST TIME: I'm not here to hurt your precious little garden, okay?! This is just a huge waste of both our time!"  
  
The dryad stared down at him, unimpressed. "You seek to fool me with your human appearance, but I will not be fooled. I have sensed the dark power within you. Leave now. You will not pass by me!"  
  
The man twitched. "I'm goin' forward. If you wanna try and stop me, go ahead, but it's your funeral." He began to walked into the forest at such an angle as to bypass the dryad.  
  
"Foolish creature!" The mystic shouted, and her body was suddenly thrust up into the air by the multitude of tree branches. "Die!"  
  
The dryad swept her arms forward, and huge bundles of roots burst from the Earth, shooting upward before descending downward toward their target like a series of missiles.  
  
The man skipped back as the roots dove toward him, and slipped a hand behind him, where a sword was strapped onto his back. Then he grabbed the sword by the sheath and jabbed it toward the drill-like tendrils in what seemed like a moronic and hopeless effort to block.  
  
*Ka-CHOOM!!* The bundles of roots ripped apart as they slammed into the man's blade, shooting off in all directions, upward and around, before arcing back down and digging hard into the ground.  
  
"Wh-What?!" The dryad gasped as her opponent was suddenly hidden under several arches of twisted oak, the root tendrils becoming firm, inflexible wood after reaching the Earth once more.  
  
'Where did he go?' The dryad thought, rising up further to look over the battlefield. Frowning, she took a moment to concentrate on casting a defensive spell.  
  
"Neemee lekka cho ka!" A green wave of energy swept up from the trees that she was attached to, taking a number of leaves along with it. Within moments that green wind was swirling around the dryad in a magical sphere, and the leaves had spread out evenly along the surface of the sphere, glowing with green energy.  
  
*CHOOM!!* A section of the root cover burst upward, and the dryad began to prepare another spell as she watched the attacker land atop one of the arches of wood.  
  
"Defiler! Perish! Akalai's thorn missile!" A green bolt exploded from the mystic's hands, and shot toward the man like a guided rocket.  
  
The man grinned and launched himself forward, finally drawing his blade from its sheath as he ran along the arched root.  
  
*Shyak!* As the attack spell reached him, he struck the missile with his sword almost casually, causing the deadly bolt to dissipate instantly.  
  
"What? No!!" The dryad shouted in disbelief. Like most of her spells, Akalia's thorn missile was actually a rather high grade of magic, and it didn't seem possible that any weapon could so easily deflect the spell.  
  
She grit her teeth, and both her hands glowed with mana. She had been wise to cast her shield, and at this point it would likely mean the difference between victory and defeat.  
  
The attacker leapt up toward the mystic as he reached the apex of the arch, and his sword began to glow with a black aura.  
  
"You want evil power? You got it!"  
  
*Kshing!* *Shang!*  
  
*Toom* The man's feet impacted heavily against the trunk of a nearby tree, and he backflipped off of it to land calmly on the ground.  
  
"Urg... ugh..." The dryad trembled as the shield around her dissipated completely, and then she gasped as one of her arms separated from her shoulder and fell to the ground.  
  
She turned toward the man, a look of indescribable loathing on her face.  
  
"Feh. Didja really think a shield of leaves could stop the sword of the destroyer?" The man brought the blade up once again, a somewhat bitter smile on his face. "You're done for."  
  
__________________________________________________________________________________  
  
Ranma jumped up as the blade cut for his neck, landing on his opponent's shoulders.  
  
"So then I said to her, 'look demon lady, I'm flattered and all, but you just had two of my friends tortured to death. I'm not gonna sleep with you.'"  
  
He kicked off his foe's back, slamming the creature into a nearby tree, and hit the ground running.  
  
"Look out!! That one has a machine gun!!" K screamed as he tried to keep himself above Ranma's head.  
  
Ranma glanced over his shoulder to watch as a large cloaked figure brought a Squad Automatic Weapon up from beneath the folds of the cloak he was wearing. "Yeah yeah, I see 'im. Anyway, then she's all like, 'what do your friends have to do with anything?'"  
  
*Rattattattattattattattattattattatta!!*  
  
Ranma somersaulted forward as a spray of bullets cut across his position, somehow managing to avoid being hit. The moment his feet touched the ground again, Ranma dashed forward and slid to a stop behind a large rock formation, the noise of bullets grinding against stone hot on his heels.  
  
"Can you believe that? She actually asked why I cared that she killed my friends! So then I say-"  
  
"LOOK!!" K shouted, diving down to land next to Ranma behind the boulder, "it's not that your story isn't interesting, but could you PLEASE tell it to me when we're not busy escaping certain death?!"  
  
Ranma frowned at him. "If death is certain, which it 'aint, why would we even bother to try and escape it?"  
  
"JUST SHUT UP AND FIGHT!!!" K shouted, frustrated.  
  
"Okay, okay, you don't need to yell..." Ranma muttered, jumping out from behind his cover.  
  
As Ranma touched the ground in front of the rock, he frowned. The current battlefield that he had jumped into was a large dirt pit in the ground with numerous rocks jutting out the sides and scattered across the bottom. Perfect for agile close-quarters fighting, while inconvenient if someone were to toss a powerful spell or explosive into the mix. Of course, given his enemies, that wasn't very likely.  
  
Grends were a tough, warrior-class species that Ranma had only fought on very few other occasions. The creatures could be likened to toughened-up lizardmen; the only differences apparent upon seeing the two types of creatures side-by-side would be that Grends tended to be larger and more muscular, their hides seemed to be darker, and their claws were long and sharp rather than hooked and stubby.  
  
When one fought a grend, however, the more subtle differences became apparent. Grends possessed a hide strong enough to shrug off bullets, and on average were strong enough to smash a rock apart with a single blow. Ranma wasn't really sure about their magical abilities, but he had never seen or heard of a grend sorcerer, so he really didn't worry about it.  
  
*Rattattattattattattattattattattatta!!*  
  
Ranma drew his katana slowly as he sped along right in front of the path of bullets, and then spotted the other grend from before jumping down into the pit to intercept him.  
  
He killed his momentum, and then drew his sword fully just as the machine gun spray reached him.  
  
*K-Tang!* *Ting!* Ranma deflected the projectiles with his katana, and then jumped over to the grend flanking him. The creature was clearly surprised he had survived the machine gun, and Ranma used that surprise to land and single powerful stroke across the demon's neck.  
  
The grend gasped and lurched backward, and then shoved its battleaxe forward head-first.  
  
Ranma jumped over the axe and spin-kicked the grend's head in mid-air, sending the creature stumbling back again. 'Damn it! Even when I use my ki to enhance the edge of the sword, that thing's barely bleeding!' Were it not for the techniques he'd learned studying Hyoken, many of the creatures of the wastes would have found themselves effectively invulnerable to the young wanderer. Ranma had learned early on that while speed and agility kept you alive, strength and technique put down enemies. Ranma was hardly lacking in those areas, but certain creatures were born with a constitution far superior to Ranma's strength.  
  
A quick glance to the rim of the pit revealed that the grend with the SAW had finished reloading, and was lining up a shot at Ranma's back. Ranma knew that it would shoot even with its ally fighting in the line of fire, and formed a plan in his mind.  
  
The grend wielding the axe shook its head mightily, confused as to how the puny human before it could have landed such a heavy blow. By the time it had recovered fully, its target was nowhere to be seen, and for some odd reason, its companion seemed to be aiming that strange human weapon right at it.  
  
*Rattattattattattattattattattattatta!!*  
  
Ranma grunted as he held the grend up to the hail of bullet's, pushing on the creature's back. He wasn't entirely sure if the machine gun fire would kill the demon, as grends were known to be fairly bullet-proof, but at least the overgrown lizard made a good shield for him.  
  
"Greaay!! GREYAAAH!!" The demon tried to jab an elbow back at Ranma (evidently it had not yet been killed), and Ranma kicked it squarely in the back, knocking it forward further into the stream of oncoming fire.  
  
'Yeesh. All that thing has hit so far is his friend here, and he's still firing?' Clearly the gunman, if it had any strategy at all, was hoping to tag Ranma with a bullet or two if he ever tried to move out from behind his shield.  
  
His shield itself wasn't exactly feeling very well at that point. Having taken nearly 200 rounds already from the SAW, the grend was just about willing to fall down and take an extended nap at that point. While the machine gun was a powerful weapon, to a grend's hide such a burst of fire could be ultimately likened to having hundreds of pins and needles pushed into its skin. Sure, it hurt like hell, and in certain places it could be lethal, but bottom line, it wasn't usually considered lethal, or particularly debilitating.  
  
The grend staggered around to face his opponent, even though he had already dropped the battleaxe. Truth be told, as his mind began to numb to the pain, so was it also starting to numb to the world around it. Not a good thing when you were facing a rather proficient demon hunter.  
  
"Dragon fist!" The name of the Hyoken school's signature technique was the last thing that the pitiful grunt ever heard, and it entered unconsciousness as it flew across the bottom of the rock pit to slam into the other side in a magnificent, fiery explosion.  
  
The gunman adjusted his aim, now have a clear shot of the pigtailed warrior. Unfortunately, this "clear shot" only meant that he could clearly see the young man, and that there wasn't any obstacle between the agile human and the multitude of pointy lead projectiles hurtling toward him.  
  
To the absolute confusion of the grend, the machine gun didn't seem to faze the human at all. Which was odd, because human technology had always been deemed almost as efficient as magic when it came to downing powerful creatures. More powerful machine guns were capable of piercing even a grend's rock-hard skin, and the most powerful guns, with the use of special ammunition, could pierce the armor of a wyvern or sand wyrm.  
  
The reptilian demon really wasn't smart or perceptive enough to tell, but Ranma wasn't actually standing up to the barrage of bullets. In fact, not a single one had even touched him. It was nearly impossible for the gunman to tell from its vantage point, but for every bullet that was fired, a split second was spared to determine its trajectory, and if necessary, a minute movement occured to bring the pigtailed warrior out of the line of fire. Luckily for Ranma, the gunman was clearly inexperienced with his weapon, and he really didn't have to do much to keep himself from being swiss-cheesed other than move slightly once a path of bullets swept across his position. To the outward observer, it appeared that he wasn't moving at all.  
  
*Rattattattattattatta-click-click-click-click-click*  
  
The grend blinked as the last of his ammo belts were sucked into the machine gun, and then snarled. This thing was out of ammunition already?  
  
"Awww, what's the matter gecko breath? Out of ammo?"  
  
The grend blinked as the sounds were mentally reconstructed within its head to form words and meanings that it could understand. Looking up, it could see a small dragon with metal armor scales hovering overhead, leering down at it.  
  
{"You there!"} It snarled, pointing its now useless weapon at K, {"You are to come with me, dragon! You are now Lord Greken's property!"}  
  
K snorted, flapping his sharp, metallic wings to stay well out of the grend's reach. "Buzz off, scaleface! I'm nobody's property!"  
  
The grend would have shouted back a response in its own guttural language, but was surprised as the SAW was suddenly wrenched from its hands. Turning around, the creature saw its target smirking while holding up its depleted weapon.  
  
"Outta ammo, huh? That's a shame. You were doin' so well, too." Ranma grinned and flipped the gun over in his hand so that the barrel was aimed at the grend.  
  
Of course, Ranma didn't possess the communications telepathy that K did, so his opponent hadn't understood him anyway. The grend swiped at the irritating human with one of its large claws, intent on ripping the insolent creature to shreds.  
  
Ranma dashed backward a couple of inches as the claws cut at him, and then dashed back forward as the attack passed. Then, in the split second before the grend could realize that he had missed and launch another strike, Ranma jabbed at the grend's neck with a knife hand strike, hitting hard enough that the demon's mouth jerked open reflexively.  
  
K stared, then winced as Ranma force-fed the grend its own depleted weapon, cramming the large metal gun down the creature's throat as it thrashed about in shock and agony.  
  
Ranma gave the SAW one last smack to make sure it was stuck tightly in the grend's windpipe, then leapt backward as the demon tried a last-ditch effort to rend him apart before it died.  
  
It missed, and Ranma shook his head sadly as the beast quickly choked, writhing about on the ground.  
  
"Well, that was gruesome," K muttered, lowering himself from above to land on Ranma's shoulder.  
  
Ranma sighed. "Yeah, well, it was the quickest way I could think of to end this. These damn lizards are too hard to put down normally."  
  
"Grends," K corrected, idly rubbing his beak across his wing to clean it. "Comparing a lizard, or a lizardman, to a grend is like comparing a kitten to a griffin."  
  
"Yeah, whatever," Ranma muttered, stretching. "I had enough trouble taking out those last three back there, and then these two ambushed me. I've got to find better ways to kill these things, or else they could wear me down too easily."  
  
Ranma started walking away from the pit he had been fighting in, when he noticed K staring at him oddly. "What's with that look?"  
  
"It's just..." K trailed off, then sighed. "It's just weird. One moment you're treating a threat to your life like it's just a hike through the woods, and then once you win without any problems, you start getting all serious about it and worrying about how you're going to win next time."  
  
Ranma smirked as he found his pack and shouldered it. "But of course, my little dragon. It's simple. Battle is like a game, see? A game with high stakes."  
  
K bristled. "Battle is NOT a game! These things could snap you in two! Your life is on the line, here!"  
  
"Right. That's what I said. High stakes," Ranma clarified, as if the dragon was just repeating him, "and they could not. Anyway, when you're in the middle of a good game, you don't really think about it much. You just react, and do your best according to what you have to work with. Whether you enjoy the game or not, it only lasts for a few minutes, and when you're in the thick of things you don't usually have much time to be worryin' over your life. So I don't waste time worryin', I just try to enjoy it, or at least try to concentrate on fighting." He raised his index finger into the air, as if making a point. "It's after the fight that you do all the worrying and strategizing and stuff. You look over what happened, how things turned out, and how to do better next time. That make sense?"  
  
"In a moronic, twisted sort of way," K admitted.  
  
Ranma snorted. "Aw, what do you know about fighting anyway?"  
  
"Eh. A little bit," K muttered, suddenly engrossed with a little spot on his wing, "I know you're the expert. But... well..." the little metadragon stopped looking at his wing and glanced at Ranma before lowering his head a little bit. "I just... I worry about you sometimes, Ranma."  
  
Ranma blinked. "What? Seriously?"  
  
K nodded, completely serious. "No kidding. I mean, I don't want to sound sappy, but you've really helped me out. Even though you were reluctant about it, you saved me from being sent to this dragon keeper guy, and then saved me from the wyvern. Since then you've fed me, helped clean me, carried me around with you and kept me safe. And, well... I appreciate it. I really do."  
  
Ranma stared oddly at the little dragon. Usually the metal beast was friendly at best, and at worst he taunted Ranma as much as possible. To see such gratitude from the little creature startled Ranma, and in truth made him feel a little guilty about the way he treated K at times.  
  
"And I'm just saying," K said, not looking at Ranma as he tried to articulate his thoughts, "I'm just afraid that you're gonna get into a fight some day, and some demon's going to cast a 'haste' spell or something and catch you in the neck when you aren't expecting it. And then, just like that, you're gone." K sighed sadly. "You can do a lot of cool stuff, but you're still a human. In a couple hundred years you'll die anyway, and I'll be alone again. I don't want that to happen any sooner than it has to, Ranma. You're my best friend. My only friend."  
  
Ranma sweatdropped, a bit overwhelmed. "Uh... typically, humans don't live a 'couple hundred years'."  
  
K blinked, and finally looked at him. "Oh. Sorry. Is it several hundred?"  
  
Ranma sweatdropped again. "Try ninety."  
  
"Ninety hundred?"  
  
"Ninety years."  
  
K blinked, then lowered his head sadly again. "Oh."  
  
"And that's only if you die of old age," Ranma continued, "the way things are going in the East today, the average lifespan in total is somewhere around 21 years."  
  
K lowered his head some more, looking even more miserable.  
  
Ranma smirked slightly, and brought his hand up to stroke the dragon sitting on his shoulder. "Hey, hey... don't worry about it, eh? I'm not goin' anywhere. 'Sides, you're going to have to live on your own sometime, right?"  
  
K shrugged his wings miserably. "I guess... but I don't want to..."  
  
"Besides, you should consider yourself lucky," Ranma said, grinning, "how many pets get to outlive their masters?"  
  
K blinked, then he glared at the pigtailed warrior. "I am NOT a 'pet', and you are NOT my 'master'!"  
  
Ranma smirked. "I feed you, clean you, carry you around with me, and I named you. If you're not my pet, then what are you?"  
  
"I'm your... I mean... I don't belong to... it's just... I..." K stuttered for a little bit as Ranma walked along, and soon he began to twitch.  
  
"It's alright," Ranma said, patting the metadragon on the back, "if it's any consolation, you're a pretty lousy pet. You hardly ever listen to me, and you talk back all the time. I can tell ya, that's not something you have to put up with from most puppies."  
  
A vein popped up on K's head, which was pretty funny to see on a creature with a metal hide. "I don't even know why I put up with you!"  
  
"Sorry bronze breath," Ranma said, smiling widely, "but you just totally spilled your guts. I know exactly why you put up with me."  
  
"Grrrrrr..."  
  
Ranma couldn't help but chuckle as K turned his head away irritably, clearly miffed. He had to admit, he really liked the little dragon. Sure, all he ever did was talk and eat, but being on the move alone for such long periods of time had caused him to forget what it was really like to travel with a friend.  
  
Truth be told, Ranma hadn't always wandered alone, but his relationships with traveling companions had always been somewhat... short-lived. The men he had traveled with usually felt rather insignificant traveling with a younger boy that could do what Ranma could, and that led to either confrontations with Ranma, or ill-advised acts of bravery that led to their bloody deaths. Meanwhile, while female comrades tended to be far more tolerant of Ranma's skill and ego, relations with them had a way of becoming... awkward. Ranma couldn't remember a single time that he had traveled with a girl that hadn't spiraled completely out of control, one way or another. Worse, parting with them always ended up being messy somehow. His departure from the Amazon village with a wyrm on his heels was actually one of the cleanest, most orderly goodbyes he had ever made.  
  
"So, what're you thinking about?" K asked, apparently over Ranma's earlier offenses. Ranma smiled. K never took any of his jibes personally.  
  
"Oh, just old times," Ranma replied. He stopped as he approached a craggy cliff wall, and looked up its face.  
  
"Oh..." K thought about that for a little bit, then had to tighten his grip on Ranma's shoulder as the pigtailed warrior jumped onto the cliff, grabbing onto a rock spire.  
  
K jumped off his perch, and flapped his wings slowly to hover upward as Ranma grabbed onto the flat sections of the cliff and began scaling it.  
  
"Hey, you were in the Death March, weren't you?"  
  
Ranma blinked, and stopped climbing. "What exactly do you mean 'in' the Death March?"  
  
"You fought in it, right? Against the demon armies?" K clarified.  
  
Ranma chewed his lip as he mulled it over. "Yeah. A little bit."  
  
"A little bit?" K asked, darting a bit closer to Ranma as the man started climbing again. "You have to be the most powerful human I've ever met! You've got to be like a hardened veteran soldier or something!"  
  
Ranma shrugged, then grabbed a spire sticking out of the cliff and pulled himself onto it. "I guess you could say that. I was in the Israeli army once."  
  
"Once?"  
  
Ranma nodded, then jumped up, grabbed another crag, and swung upward to land on top of it. "Just once. I wasn't really a soldier so much as a mercenary, but I did the same stuff."  
  
K sped up to climb to Ranma's altitude, then once again hovered over his head. "Really? The way you fight, I would have thought you'd have been battling in the warzones all your life!"  
  
Ranma smirked. "Give me a break, K. I was ten years old before the war even began. And I try to avoid the 'warzones' if I can."  
  
K blinked, unsure of what to say to that.  
  
Ranma sat down on the crag, and pulled out a canteen of water. "I have nothin' but respect for soldiers, but that's just not what I do, you know?" He unscrewed the cap of the canteen and then took a long gulp before speaking again. "War is numbers and tactics. You have enough people in the right place, and move them at the right time, and you win. That's just not me. Fighting my way is about spirit and skill and stuff like that. You face down your enemy, so that they KNOW who put them down. It's the whole adventuring thing, you know?" Ranma put away the canteen, then leapt upward to grab onto the top edge of the cliff.  
  
K nodded slowly. "I see. You've been on a lot of small campaigns, haven't you? Stuff like raiding the slave caravan I was on?"  
  
"Yup!" Ranma confirmed, flipping himself up onto the top of the cliff and onto stable ground again. "Well, well, well. What do we have here?"  
  
K flew up quickly to get a look at the top of the cliff, and then blinked rapidly once he glimpsed what lied there.  
  
More than a dozen grends lay dead around a small clearing, which itself was heavily torn and looked to have been wracked by a few small explosions.  
  
"Whoa! What did this?" K said, gaping as he landed on Ranma's shoulder once more. "Are those missile scars?"  
  
"Yeah, right," Ranma snorted, looking at one of the blackened gouges in the Earth. "Take notes, K. Missiles explode around the impact point, for the most part. Look at these things here." He pointed toward one of the ruts in the ground, which started at deep, clean indentations, and then fanned out into a series of scars and burns in one general direction. "The energy is too well-directed and the impact is too clean for it to be an explosive. Has to be magic, or maybe ki energy. Also, look at the corpses; most of them have been cut apart. Melee weapons don't mix well with rockets or artillery."  
  
"Well, someone knows their battlezones," K mumbled to himself. "What about all the bullet casings on the ground?"  
  
Ranma pointed to the side, and K sweatdropped as he caught sight of another SAW, this one cleaved in half.  
  
"Oh... missed that."  
  
Ranma bit his lip as he looked around. "Look, K. Do you notice anything else that's weird?"  
  
K blinked, and his eyes widened as he came to a realization. "There's no blood. Most of these things are chopped apart like diced onions, but there's not a drop of blood anywhere!" K stared uneasily at the grends' bodies. While they looked rather dry and little bit withered, the grends had apparently been killed recently enough so that the area didn't even smell yet. "Creepy."  
  
Ranma shrugged. "I don't know about that. Whatever did this certainly hasn't done me any harm, and I'd rather not see this whole field full of blood." He licked his lips. "Still, I guess we should keep a lookout. Demons that do stuff like this usually aren't friendly."  
  
Then Ranma stopped, and turned toward K. "Hey, you know a lot of different types of freaks and monsters and stuff, right? Don't you know of any demons that drain blood?"  
  
K frowned. "Well, sure, there are a few, but most of them either drain most of the internal body, not just the blood, and only a few of 'em would be able to stand up to a group of armed grends without losing one of their own for us to find." Then he shook his head, "And none of them would drink blood out of the dirt. Look at this; there's no way that all their blood was drained right out of their bodies."  
  
"Good point," Ranma said, biting his lip. "Hmmmm..." Then his head jerked around, and he stared off into the distance. "Wait a minute..."  
  
K stared as Ranma ran forward, and then stopped as he scanned the surroundings. The cliff they had found themselves on appeared to be at the edge of a forest, and Ranma was trying to look through the scattered trees at something along the forest's border. "Something wrong?"  
  
"K, fly up and see if there's anything alive over there," Ranma commanded, pointing a finger in the direction he had been looking.  
  
Confused, K pushed into the air, quickly clearing the few trees that surrounded them so that he could get a good view of the land surrounding the forest.  
  
The first thing he spotted was a small lake that seemed to be, oddly enough, feeding the forest next to it. K found this odd because a freshwater lake of that size would have probably brought the forest in around it.  
  
As he took a better look at the forest's edge, however, he realized that there was a series of huge root formations that led from deep into the forest into the water, like a huge organic irrigation pipe. While organic, it was easy to guess that it wasn't natural. Something had created it to fuel the growth of the forest more efficiently, while still keeping the lake open and accessible.  
  
'What the?' "Ranma! I see something! A bunch of broken trees and stuff way over that way!" K jabbed his beak forward, then blinked as he realized that Ranma was already well on his way ahead, leaving the metadragon in his dust. "Hey! Wait up!"  
  
Ranma grit his teeth as he sped along the edge of the forest, making minor adjustments as he ran to clear his path of the scattered trees ahead of him.  
  
'Something up there! I can feel it! But... it feels different... dead, almost...' At least, that's the only way he could think of to describe it. Ranma had been fine-tuning his ki senses ever since he had fought the jakku outside the Amazon village, and though he obviously had far to go as far as comprehension, he had already made substantial progress in his perception.  
  
This was becoming a great source of confusion as Ranma got closer to the battlezone. His senses allowed him to detect ki energy, which was the energy of all living things, animal and even plant. When something died, however, the ki left its body. So sensing something "dead" wasn't actually possible, unless it was reanimated. But undead just didn't feel like this.  
  
Feeling somewhat frustrated, Ranma jumped up into the air, taking to the treetops. Immediately he was able to see a number of large, unnatural-looking wooden arches, many of them shattered or cut.  
  
Landing on one such arch, Ranma took his first look at the battlefield, perplexed.  
  
With the exception of the lack of corpses, it looked very much like the last battlefield, with several ruts cut into the ground, and a few burn scars along the shattered trees. In one part of the area, it looked as if something had simply charged through swinging wildly, as there was a stretch of ground littered with chopped and crushed wood, with all the trees and roots around it shredded and torn.  
  
Ranma continued searching as K finally caught up with him. "I don't get it... I can sense SOMETHING alive around here, but-"  
  
"Omigosh! That's a high dryad!" K shouted, darting past Ranma to land on the ground a ways in front of him.  
  
Ranma blinked, trying to figure out what K saw that he didn't.  
  
The metadragon landed next to an unusually-shaped chunk of bark, and looked it over. "Wow. She's badly hurt. All her life roots have been cut. And they're not healing, either! I wonder why..."  
  
Ranma scratched his head. "What? What are you talking about? What are you lookin' at, anyway?"  
  
It wasn't until the dryad stirred that Ranma realized that K was talking about the very "chunk of bark" that he had been staring at.  
  
"Whoa! Hey! Hold on, let me help ya!"  
  
Ranma immediately jumped down toward the body, and then gave it a careful medical assessment (as best he could, anyway, considering he was checking a creature of wood and bark).  
  
It didn't look good, but that much he had pretty much expected. As far as he could tell, whatever this "high dryad" looked like before, all that was left was an upper torso with only one arm left, and that had been cut up enough that he couldn't tell the mystic from the rest of the wood scrap littering the ground.  
  
Gently, he took hold of one of the shoulders, and then carefully turned the dryad over. A vaguely human-like face carved of wood stared up at him, holding two faded eyes of solid white. The dryad's front revealed a pair of blocky protrusions that seemed to be a tree carving's mockery of women's breasts, as well as a rather severe-looking burn. The body curved slightly as it reached the waist, which leaked a mess of sap rather than blood, having been cut off much like one of the creature's arms.  
  
"So this is a dryad, huh?" Ranma mumbled, looking her over. "I thought they were more human-like."  
  
"Those are lesser dryads," K explained, "this is a high dryad. They take a less formal body structure to improve their manipulation of trees and plants, as well as increasing their regeneration abilities." The tiny dragon frowned. "That's what worries me, though. To a high dryad, this isn't a mortal wound. But it's not regenerating. You see, these things are bonded to a certain tree in the forests that they protect, and it acts as a lifeline; they can only be killed if the tree is destroyed. I guess something killed her host tree."  
  
"N-No..."  
  
Ranma and K blinked as the woody-looking form mumbled out a denial, and realized that the mystic wasn't unconscious.  
  
"Hey, are you going to be okay? What happened?" Ranma asked, looking back over the wound. 'That's what I was feeling! There's some kind of weird energy here! But what is it?'  
  
"I... I was at... attacked," the dryad mumbled slowly, "by... by a demon in human... guise..." she coughed lightly, then groaned.  
  
Ranma frowned. "Attacked by a demon, huh? What'd it look like?"  
  
"He-" the dryad gasped suddenly, then seemed to regain her breath, "he was a tall man... with a... large broadsword that had a dark aura... he used a technique that... neu... neutralized my regeneration... I will not live much longer, and my ho-host t-tree will soon die."  
  
"Why did he attack?" K asked, looking at the dryad somewhat skeptically.  
  
"He must have been after... the Phoenix Stone... but he... has not found it..."  
  
"Phoenix Stone?" Ranma muttered.  
  
Suddenly the dryad moved its remaining arm to clutch Ranma's sleeve, and he gulped as the dim lights of her eyes stared into his.  
  
"Please... good stranger... k-keep the stone from his reach at all costs! I... I can protect it no longer..."  
  
"Eh?!" Ranma jerked back as the high dryad's body died right in front of him, her chest cracking and bursting out in a spray of wet, rotted wood. The rest of her body quickly hardened, becoming dry and white within seconds as the last vestiges of life poured out of her body.  
  
Ranma kept his eyes squeezed shut as he shook the bits of wood off of his face, and then began spitting on the ground to get the rest of it out of his mouth.  
  
K tilted his head to one side as he stared at the high dryad. "Huh. This guy must be something to take out a high dryad like this. Even though she does seem fairly young."  
  
Ranma finished spitting on the ground, then turned to K. "You can TELL? She's made out of wood!"  
  
K smirked and pointed to the stump of her arm. "Count the rings, dude."  
  
"That's sick," Ranma muttered, walking up to the body. "What in the...? There's something in her chest!"  
  
"Eh?" K jumped around the corpse to get a look at the front, then squinted as he noticed a faint red light in the dryad's chest cavity. "What is that?"  
  
Getting ready for any unpleasant surprises, and making sure to use the hand with the gauntlet on, Ranma reached inside the dead body and dug around until he felt something harder than the soft rot that mostly filled the cavity. Withdrawing his hand, Ranma found that he had grabbed a spherical gemstone, maybe an inch and a half in diameter. It was a translucent red, and the inside swirled with a mix of crimson that looked like liquid fire.  
  
"Cool."  
  
K looked thoughtful as he stared at the gem. "Huh... some powerful mystics and demons leave behind magical gemstones and such when they die, but I don't think dryads do... so this must be the 'Phoenix Stone' she was talking about."  
  
Ranma stared at the shiny orb, and his eye twitched. "Great. A quest."  
  
K blinked. "A quest?"  
  
Ranma nodded. "A quest. I meet a dying chick, she gives me a magic rock, and there's some powerful jackass out there trying to get the rock. That's a quest, all right. *Sigh* Oh well. It's not like I've got anything better to do." Ranma pocketed the gem, then lifted his pack higher onto his back.  
  
"Ah, I see," K said. "So now what?"  
  
"Well, now I'm going to find this jerk and take him out."  
  
K blinked. "Huh? You're going to... but you can't! This guy took out a high dryad! By himself!"  
  
Ranma shrugged. "She didn't look that tough. I probably could've taken her too."  
  
"She was on the ground dying when you saw her!"  
  
"That's beside the point," Ranma insisted, "I haven't seen anything so far to make me believe he's any stronger'n me."  
  
K sighed. "Didn't the dryad tell you to keep the stone AWAY from this guy? Going after him kind of defeats that purpose."  
  
Ranma rolled his eyes. "No, she told me to keep it out of his reach." He grinned. "So long as the demon can't touch me, it can't touch the stone, right?"  
  
"Here we go again," K muttered, "seriously though, I don't know about this 'quest'. Something's not right here."  
  
Ranma looked back at K. "What do you mean?"  
  
"Well, it was the way she put it," K said, staring hard at the dryad's corpse, "'he must be after the stone'. This demon apparently didn't say what he wanted, and he was probably the same one that killed those grends back there." Then K looked up at Ranma. "Besides, you heard the description! Vague, yeah, but doesn't it sound a little like that guy who passed by the Amazon village ahead of us? He was supposed to be a demon hunter!"  
  
Ranma shrugged. "Whatever, man. He killed the tree chick, and he was probably searching for her treasure. That 'aint cool. This is about justice. Bottom line, I'm just going to find him, whoop his ass, and get this whole quest over and done with as quickly and smoothly as possible!" Then Ranma frowned. "Barring, of course, a sudden attack by a third party that's also after this rock thingy."  
  
K blinked. "Huh?"  
  
*Swoosh!*  
  
Ranma grabbed K off the ground, and then jumped away from the oncoming fireball, rolling into a crouch as he landed.  
  
*Kabooom!!* The fireball detonated right over the dryad's corpse, blowing it and much of the surrounding wood to ash.  
  
Ranma clicked his tongue, then looked up at the source. A young woman with short hair and wings flew above the lake, wearing a set of blue upper-torso armor and wielding a red scimitar that even now blazed with magical fire.  
  
The woman glared down at Ranma. "My name is Kiima! Surrender the Phoenix Stone to me, or die!"  
  
__________________________________________________________________________________  
  
Phoenix Mountain had always been a place of legend. For many of those tribes surrounding it, the Phoenix used to be a mysterious and mythical people, a race existing formally in stories, yet frequently encountered in rumors and second-hand tales.  
  
Of course, by the time the existence of the Phoenix tribe had been largely confirmed as fact, the surviving people of China had already seen such horrific and strange things that the Phoenix were all too easily accepted, although many people had theorized that they were just a savage tribe of angels that had settled in China. The Phoenix people, who were accustomed to being seen with fear of malice, were soon treated with respectful apathy and caution.  
  
Things hadn't remained that way. The leader of the Phoenix tribe, Saffron, had fought on both sides during the Death March. Initially, the Phoenix people were sent to raid the camps of the demonic invaders, fearful that Phoenix Mountain may fall if they let those lands surrounding it be taken.  
  
One day, however, a peddler came to Phoenix Mountain, and had offered a gift for the demigod Saffron. That gift had been a nameless red gemstone, its center filled with glowing, molten flame.  
  
Treated with suspicion at first, it soon became Saffron's favorite possession, and for reasons unknown to his people, suddenly began to strike out at the lands around Phoenix Mountain, seizing territory for himself. The demons were sought out, not as vermin to be slain, but as allies to be negotiated with and assisted.  
  
"Phoenix Stone" was the name given to the jewel by Saffron himself. Though his mages never quite found out what the gem's purpose and exact abilities were, and Saffron was too fearful of being stolen to send it to a foreign land for a better wizard to study it, it was well known that the stone gave the demigod even more power than his formidable natural complement. Since then, Saffron had happily taken on the lofty title of "Demon Lord" (despite arguable assertions that he wasn't a demon at all), and was treated as such.  
  
"My lord, Lord Thaeramon has returned, as well as the warriors we have sent with him," the winged court attendant bowed low before Saffron, one hand over his heart.  
  
Saffron grinned as he rested his head on his fist, his elbow planted on the golden armrest of his throne. "Excellent. How many have returned alive?"  
  
"At my count, all but three, my lord. A few others have minor wounds, but nothing that should prevent them from serving in battle, should they need to soon."  
  
Saffron nodded. "Hm. Convenient that Doppler possessed magic that easily slew the enemies that we ourselves were so helpless against, isn't it? Do you suppose his loyalties lie elsewhere?"  
  
The attendant shifted nervously. This was dangerous ground, commenting on betrayal and treason, and Saffron had grown somewhat paranoid over the last few years. "I... would remind you, Lord Saffron, that Lord Thaeramon holds no actual 'loyalty' toward you. Merely the terms of a contract of exchange..."  
  
Saffron snorted and looked away, apparently satisfied with the answer.  
  
The attendant continued. "Also, although it is almost unthinkable at how ineffective our warriors and mages were against these 'jakku', it is my understanding that many magic-users of skill are capable of dispatching them."  
  
Saffron glared slightly at his attendant, and the man quickly silenced himself. "Show Doppler in," Saffron snapped, leaning back in his throne.  
  
The attacks by invisible assassins had come without warning, and had increased in frequency at an alarming rate. At first the problem had been answered with simple increases in the size of the guard, but that had only added more trained guards to the death toll. When attacks had started happening within Phoenix Mountain itself, Saffron had become desperate for an answer, even sending his few skilled magic-users to their deaths in a useless attempt to stop the marauders.  
  
Surprisingly, an answer had arrived in the form of another demon lord, a reputedly powerful sorcerer that was known as being reasonably human-friendly. He had simply arrived, with a small group of specially trained warriors, and said that he could rid the area of the enemies, which he had termed "jakku". All he had requested was for a group of Saffron's warriors to guide him through the invaded territories.  
  
Saffron had been skeptical at first, but all the reports he had received told him that Doppler had been doing exactly as he said he'd do. Through a few spells cast at the right time, the sorcerer and his lackeys had succeeded in ridding the Phoenix kingdom of a threat it had seemed helpless against.  
  
The price, however, was not one that Saffron looked forward to paying.  
  
"Ah! Lord Saffron! It's been too long!" Doppler said as he entered the chambers, spreading his four arms wide as if he was going to rush up to the throne and embrace the Phoenix king.  
  
Saffron stared. "It's been three days."  
  
Doppler grinned and clasped his hands behind his back. "Two days longer than it should have taken, my good friend. It appears it wasn't really so simple as I thought to purge the filth from your kingdom here."  
  
Saffron rolled his eyes. "Yes, yes, whatever. Before you collect your price, however, I must demand that the man responsible for creating all these... 'jakku' is captured or..." Saffron trailed off as Doppler's grin widened.  
  
With the danger of interrupting past, Doppler raised one of his hands in the air. "Way ahead of you, my friend. I sensed something in the Eastern quarries, and so led your warriors there on our last excursion. We found the man who created the jakku, as well as those bigger and nastier ones."  
  
Saffron blinked. "Bigger and nastier ones?"  
  
"Yes. He calls them 'hamakku', or 'ghost mauler' in Gothraieen. Not really important. I presume you'd like to see him?" Doppler grinned and snapped the fingers he held in the air.  
  
A magic circle drew itself on the ground in lines of blue light, and from the circle blasted a pillar of light that eventually faded into the form of a raggedy-looking man in a dirty robe. He had brown hair that stood up on his head, and had several brown circles on his cheeks and a red triangle on his forehead that marked him as an evon. He was suspended in mid-air, trapped in a sort of magical bubble, and looked understandably upset.  
  
"How dare you do this to me?! Don't you know who I am?! I'll have you all butcher-"  
  
"SILENCE!!!" Saffron bellowed, standing up and spreading his golden wings. "You. You, who dare attack MY kingdom. Tell me who you are, and why you have done this."  
  
The evon peered up at Saffron, apparently more fascinated then intimidated. "Well, I'll be. So you're that big Phoenix that keeps all the little ones in line. Wondered about you. You look a lot different then the bodies I've already looked at."  
  
*FWOOM!* Saffron's body lit up in a fiery aura, and guards lining the wall of the chamber all gulped and flinched away from the heat.  
  
The evon grinned. "As for me, I'm Genex Karl! Master necromancer and alchemist! What's your name, sparky?"  
  
Saffron slowly got up his throne, his talons awash with fire. "Answer the second question, pitiful creature."  
  
"Testing. I've been testing my hamakku. They seem to work rather well, don't you agree?" Genex grinned.  
  
*KA-SHRAK!!* Saffron raked his claws forward, and Doppler raised an eyebrow as a stream of flame gouged into the ground of the chambers and blasted forward, engulfing Genex and hitting the chamber doors hard.  
  
*Clack* *Clack* Little bits of charred bone clattered across the chamber floor, and many of the guards began visibly sweating.  
  
Doppler blinked, and glanced over his shoulder at the smoldering trench of burnt ash that began just a few inches from his foot. "Nice shot."  
  
Saffron slowly let his aura die, turning a dark gaze on Doppler. "Well... you've kept your end of the bargain... I suppose I should keep mine."  
  
Doppler smiled pleasantly, clapping his lower hands together and rubbing them. "Ah, yes. Don't worry, I'll have the Phoenix Stone back to you as soon as I'm done with my experiments. And as for the... other items I asked for-"  
  
"Yes, I know," Saffron interrupted, waving his talons dismissively, "I've selected twenty of my finest warriors for you to take for yourself. They're yours."  
  
Doppler blinked, then put his upper left hand on the back of his head. "Oh, no, that's not necessary at all. Truth be told, I've already selected the Phoenix I'll be taking."  
  
Saffron stared at him oddly. "Then you must not have selected any of my elite force; they were all here."  
  
Doppler nodded. "Correct. I took a few out of the party you sent me, and have chosen a few more from the civilian populace. They'll do just fine. I wouldn't want to deplete your power base." Doppler didn't want to tell the demigod that he needed an equal number of male and female Phoenix, and that they all had to be fertile. The elite guard was almost totally male, and a combination of almost endless exercise and very unfortunate training accidents had damaged some of their reproductive potential.  
  
Saffron stared a moment longer at his fellow demon lord, then shrugged and began walking back toward his throne. "As you will have it. It's only twenty, right? And none of them are magic-users? I can't afford to give you any of my mages!"  
  
Doppler smirked. "Do not fear. It is as you have said. And the stone?"  
  
Saffron snorted as he took his seat once again. "A servant of mine is fetching it. Once the attacks began within the mountain, I didn't want to risk the stone being stolen. I had it sent to a powerful forest guardian nearby for safe-keeping. She's a minor acquaintance of mine, and she's kept many unpleasant types away from Phoenix Mountain by guarding the pass through the great forest to the west. Dryads despise the undead, so she was actually eager to help, and she's literally rooted to that forest, so I don't have to fear her running off with my property."  
  
Doppler clasped his hands behind his back. "Ah, well then, I suppose it should be a short wait, correct?"  
  
Saffron was about to agree, and tell Doppler about Kiima's competence and loyalty, when the other demon lord suddenly turned, as if startled.  
  
A moment later, the double-doors of the royal chambers burst open, and a soldier quickly dashed forward, skidding to a stop on his knees.  
  
"My lord! Something has happened! A thief has stolen the Phoenix Stone!"  
  
"WHAT?!?!" Saffron jumped up, his aura ablaze with fury. "WHAT HAS HAPPENED?!?! WHERE IS KIIMA?!?!" He bellowed, talons twitching.  
  
"I... I am here... my lord..."  
  
Saffron's aura slowly guttered as Kiima entered the throne room, assisted by two soldiers that were holding her up. She had a few bruises on her face, and several bandages were wrapped around her arms and legs. By inspection, one can see that she had been hit hard several times in her stomach and right below her breasts, as her armor was in a most pitiful shape.  
  
The soldier that had opened the door bowed his head even deeper. "We found her at the foot of the mountain, unconscious. She tried to make it back here, but collapsed before she could make it."  
  
"Ki-Kiima..." Saffron stuttered out. Then his face twisted into a snarl. "Who has done this?! Who has taken my stone?!"  
  
Kiima hung her head shamefully. "By the time I arrived at the forest, I was too late to keep the Phoenix Stone from him. The guardian lie dead at his feet, and the stone was in his hands. I immediately attacked him to try and get the stone back, but..." she squeezed her eyes shut and bit her lip as tears began to flow. "He... He was far too powerful. I should have known, if he was able to dispatch the forest guardian, but... within moments after the engagement I was at his mercy. After enough strikes so that I was no longer able to attack him, he simply sheathed his weapons and left. I have failed, utterly and completely." Kiima bit back a sob as fear and shame overtook her, and was barely able to hear the sound of Saffron's feet crossing the length of the chambers.  
  
*Whack!* The two soldiers holding Kiima flinched back as Saffron lashed out, striking their patient with a fierce backhand. Kiima was launched away from them, and spun limply in the air as she flew toward the chamber wall.  
  
*Wham!*  
  
Doppler raised an eyebrow. "Harsh."  
  
Saffron glared hard at Kiima, flexing his claws menacingly. "You incompetent wench... you dare to show your face to me, after such a shameful loss?"  
  
Kiima merely slumped to the ground, her tears mixing with her blood running down the chamber wall, bereft even of the strength required to prostrate herself before her lord and master.  
  
"I expect PERFORMANCE, Kiima. Did I not train you? Did I not equip you? Where is your blade, which has made you the victor of countless duels?!"  
  
The first soldier gulped, and Saffron quickly oriented on him. Very slowly, the Phoenix man pulled out a red, twisted, metal object from behind his back.  
  
"Th-This w-would be what's l-left of the fire sword K-Kshyakno, my lord." The scimitar had been bent back and forth along the flat of the blade, so that it resembled a set of stairs when one observed the edge of the sword.  
  
Saffron turned back to Kiima. "Tell me... Who. Did. This."  
  
"As..." Kiima mumbled softly, her eyes glazed and unfocused as blood leaked from her head and arm. "As he... left... he told me his name... Ranma... Ranma Saotome..."  
  
Saffron's talons glowed and flexed as he rolled the name over in his head, as if he imagined slashing the name itself into pieces.  
  
"Well, this is all very interesting, but rather depressing if you ask me. If you don't have the stone, well, I'll be off." Doppler turned around and began to walk out of the chambers.  
  
"Wait," Saffron commanded. Doppler stopped, and turned back to look at him, an eyebrow raised. "You're leaving? Without the stone?"  
  
"Well, not immediately," Doppler reasoned, shrugging his shoulders. "I'll stay the night, if you'll have me. It's a ways back to the Empire, after all. But yes, I'll leave without the stone. You seem to have enough trouble with it as it is. I don't want to be a bother."  
  
Saffron stared at Doppler strangely. No matter how much he talked to the eccentric veirheelu, Doppler Thaeramon continued to totally confound him. The demon seemed, for all intents and purposes, a flighty and happy-go-lucky fool, and yet talking to him always gave Saffron the sinking feeling that he had just been robbed, or was the butt of some exceedingly complex joke.  
  
"Very well then. The maids have already prepared a room for you. Your devil companion has already stopped in there." Saffron turned to the soldiers who had entered his court so suddenly. "Get HER," he spat, waving his hand in Kiima's general direction, "out of my sight!"  
  
Doppler shook his head as the soldiers rushed to obey, and quickly walked out of the royal chambers, entering the greater halls of Phoenix Mountain. It was a short walk from the royal hall to the guest suites, so he was immediately able to sense Tio's power and home in on it, rather than asking a Phoenix for directions.  
  
Reaching his room, he pushed through the doors, and beheld an extravagantly decorated room with two large beds. Upon one sat Tio, wearing a white robe rather than his regular armor.  
  
The devil grinned as his master entered. "How did it go?"  
  
Doppler sighed. "Well, they don't have the stone. Most unfortunate." Then he made a few gestures with his hand, and lines of mana energy began to form in the air.  
  
The lines quickly drew themselves into arcane symbols, and then faded away as a blue pulse blasted through the room along the walls and floor.  
  
Several blue lights appeared in various places in the room; under both beds, next to the lamp, and embedded in the wood next to the pillows and dining table.  
  
Doppler smirked and moved his hands once more, casting another spell. This time, a translucent bubble grew around Doppler, carefully removed from the blue illuminations. Tio immediately got up and entered the bubble.  
  
"They planted their bugs, I see. Not very clever, though I admit that it would surprise many, what with all the rest of the technology you see around this cave." Doppler smirked.  
  
"So they bought the story, but didn't have the stone?" Tio asked.  
  
Doppler nodded. "Remind me to thank Genex for a job well done. He did a very good job on that golem copy of himself, too. The resources that his jakku have 'liberated' have been secured and are moving toward Japan, correct?"  
  
Tio nodded. "Yes, my lord. And you will have some Phoenix as test subjects as well. It should be interesting to see just how closely their biology matches the angels'." Tio frowned. "Though it is a pity about the stone."  
  
Doppler sighed, bobbing his head up and down. "Ah, yes. There's just something biting about watching a plan years in the making crumble apart because of some fool adventurer hunting for treasure." Doppler smirked. "I wonder if Saffron ever wonders anymore who gave him the Phoenix Stone in the first place? Or why?"  
  
Tio grinned. "I suspect his people do. Even though most people stop talking when they see me, I still manage to hear whispered rumors of 'the great Phoenix god' going mad."  
  
Doppler snorted. "As usual, the general public proves to be more perceptive than their leader." He looked thoughtful for a moment. "Still... I wouldn't chalk the Phoenix Stone up as a total loss." He then stopped talking, and pressed his lips into a thin line.  
  
*Knock* *Knock*  
  
Sighing, Doppler dispelled the bubble silencing their conversation with a wave of his hand. "Yes? Who is it?"  
  
The door opened slowly, and an usually tall and busty Phoenix entered, clad in a short white robe that maximized the exposure of leg and cleavage.  
  
Doppler's eye twitched slightly. "Can I help you?"  
  
The Phoenix woman bowed deeply. "I was sent to warm your bed tonight, Lord Thaeramon." Doppler noted that she held the position for far longer than was necessary, clearly to show off her breasts even more.  
  
Doppler waved both his left hands at her in a dismissive gesture. "Then you may go. I have no need of you."  
  
The woman blinked in surprise, clearly not used to being rejected. "M-My lord?"  
  
'How amusing,' Doppler thought idly, 'the foolish thing actually looks hurt.' "I have no desire for the pleasures of the flesh, woman. And Tio here... well, he prefers women with more... meat on them." Doppler smiled amiably, and Tio flashed the Phoenix a toothy smile.  
  
The woman flinched back, unsure of how to interpret the last statement. "I-I see. I'll go then." Bowing again quickly, she rushed from the room, leaving a few feathers behind in her haste.  
  
Doppler shook his head as the door closed. "Ah, it'll be nice to return to my laboratory. Still..."  
  
The demon lord sat down on his bed, using his top pair of arms to prop up his chin, while steepling his lower pair of hands together in thought. "Ranma Saotome... something about this piques my interest..."  
  
__________________________________________________________________________________  
  
His name was Rayden Shikodan. Throughout the years, from his birth to the Death March itself, it had been his lifelong mission to root out and destroy the malevolent creatures that threatened mankind. He had survived countless battles, slaughtered scores of horrendous monsters, and consumed more alcohol than most Irish families do in a lifetime.  
  
A demon hunter of the highest caliber, most hellspawn who had survived an encounter with him quaked with fear at the sound of his name, fearful that some dark hand might descend and smite them.  
  
For over a decade, he had fought and stalked the forces of darkness and death, though he was at best an agent of darkness and death himself.  
  
Today, however, he had met his match.  
  
"Stinky demon!" *Whap!*  
  
"Take that, you evil, evil man!" *Whap!*  
  
"Get out of here! Get!" *Whap!*  
  
Rayden's left eye twitched as the rocks continued pelting him. They didn't do any damage, not even the bigger ones, but they were almost as annoying as the screeching young mystics throwing them.  
  
Rayden had known that where there's a high dryad, there's usually several lesser dryads about, but after mortally wounding the high dryad, he had expected the others to stay out of his way. And they had. For about five minutes. As soon as the sprites, nymphs, and lesser dryads learned that Rayden didn't actually lash out and kill everything that approached him, they had apparently taken it upon themselves to find out exactly where that critical line was by annoying the hell out of him.  
  
So here he was, walking miserably through a thick, vibrant forest, being stoned by a small crowd of generally small, naked, multicolored girls. It was times like these that he almost wished he was as bloodthirsty and evil as he was often made out to be.  
  
"Go away!" *Whap!*  
  
"Meanie!" *Whap!*  
  
"Tree-killer!" *Whap!*  
  
"Dummy head!" *Whap!*  
  
"Evil smelly monster demon killer man!" *Whap!*  
  
Rayden grit his teeth. 'They're just little baby mystics. They don't know what they're doing. The're like kids. Don't kill the kids, Rayden. Just calm down...'  
  
"Hey! Look up!"  
  
Rayden jerked his head up at the voice, to see a little pink sprite about the size of his head floating at him.  
  
"Take this! Stinging dust!" The sprite flapped its wings forward, and a grainy red dust blew forward into Rayden's face.  
  
The demon hunter squeezed his eyes shut as the stinging began, but that didn't do anything except obscure his vision. The burning in his eyes flared hotter, and the mystics around him continued throwing their rocks and taunts with equal vigor.  
  
'Okay... One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.'  
  
*Clap!*  
  
"Erk!"  
  
The mystics all stopped short suddenly as Rayden clapped his hands sharply over the sprite hovering above him. Then he let his arms spread apart again, and the sprite floated down to the ground awkwardly, dazed.  
  
"That's. IT." *Choom!* Rayden's hand shot out to the side of him, and his fingers sunk deeply into the bark of a nearby tree of respectable size.  
  
*K-k-k-krreeeek...* *Kshoom!* Positioning his feet slightly for extra leverage, Rayden then tore the tree out of the ground with one arm, lifting up a substantial quantity of dirt and rock along with it.  
  
The mystics, thankfully, got the message quickly enough.  
  
"AAAAAH!!!"  
  
"Run!"  
  
"Run away!"  
  
"Evil man kill now!"  
  
"Scary!"  
  
*Whoosh!* *Whoosh!* Rayden swung the tree trunk around a few times experimentally, smashing a few smaller trees out of the way in a pointlessly destructive display of his strength.  
  
"And don't come back!" He yelled. Then he looked down, and glared at the little sprite girl who was shaking her head to clear it.  
  
The sprite looked up.  
  
Rayden glared down.  
  
"Shouldn't you be running in fear 'bout now?"  
  
The sprite blinked, then nodded seriously. "EEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!"  
  
Rayden snorted as the sprite flew away, resting the tree trunk on his shoulder. "Humph. Little brats."  
  
He was just getting ready to move on when something jarred his senses in the back of his mind. While Rayden would never be mistaken for a clever or perceptive fighter, it simply wasn't possible to survive as he had on strength and constitution alone. Thus, he had developed a crude, but functional manner of detecting powerful beings nearby.  
  
Rayden turned around. Whatever it was he had sensed, it was no nymph, and he was fairly sure even the more powerful lesser dryads would've gotten the hint by now. "Who's there?!"  
  
*Wssh*  
  
A darkish blur suddenly appeared along the lower web of branches making up the forest canopy, and Rayden gripped his makeshift club tightly. However, the blur moved too quickly for Rayden to track, at least as far as lateral motion was concerned, and the demon hunter soon found himself without even a hint of a target.  
  
*Shing!* *Wssh*  
  
A brief glint of sunlight reflecting off metal flashed above him, and Rayden looked up just in time to see the very same blur he had observed before jump off of the tree he was holding.  
  
*Thud* The top half of the tree Rayden was holding fell to the ground, the trunk having been cut clean through.  
  
Rayden raised an eyebrow, then let the bottom half of his tree fall to the ground. Wouldn't be any good against something that fast, anyway.  
  
A brief glance at the treetops, and he found his opponent: an Asian teenage boy with a pigtail, wearing leather armor and carrying a few weapons at his hip. One of the weapons was a katana, so Rayden correctly guessed that that was what was used to cut the tree.  
  
'Impressive, though at that speed, he could've gone for my neck. What's he want?'  
  
Rayden leaned back a bit, cracking a smile. "Human, eh? At least you look like it. I don't sense any dark aura on ya."  
  
Ranma stared down at the enemy demon hunter disdainfully. "Yeah. Human." 'He's slow. I can tell that much. But he doesn't seem worried at all, even though I was too fast for him.' "Are you the one that killed the tree lady?"  
  
This guy certainly fit the bill. And it seemed that K had been right about connecting him to the Amazons' description. Rayden was a musclebound giant of a man, six foot three with the frame any football player would envy. He wore a heavy brown trench coat with matching leather gloves, and Ranma could see the toes of a pair of heavy boots poking out from under the coat. Sheathed on his back was a large broadsword with an ornate hilt; the pommel held an oblong purple gemstone, and the hilt forked out into spikes that jabbed back around the handle and forward along the base of the blade itself.  
  
Rayden blinked. "The dryad? Yeah, that was me. Wouldn't let me pass, is all."  
  
Ranma's eyes narrowed. "I don't like your attitude."  
  
Rayden smirked. "Then come here and do something about it, kid." Rayden stepped back, and he removed the sword from his back, sheath and all, and held the middle of it in front of him.  
  
"There you are! Are you trying to leave me behind?!"  
  
Rayden glanced to the side at the source of the irate voice, only to see a little dragon with metal scales. "A robot dragon?"  
  
"Metadragon," K corrected. "And you must be the demon."  
  
Rayden twitched. "Somethin' like that, yeah. You guys here to make s'mores with me, or are you here about birch breath back there?"  
  
*Ssshnk* Ranma drew his katana and held it in front of him, parallel to his shoulders.  
  
Rayden grinned. "Well, I've got my answer. Let's do this, slick."  
  
Ranma hopped down and dashed forward, intending on disarming his foe quickly. Aiming for the blade, Ranma moved his katana opposite the direction he was moving, hoping that the unexpected application of force would surprise Rayden.  
  
Ranma ended up being surprised, and Rayden's arm didn't even budge from the blow. Not wanting to waste the charge, Ranma quickly reversed direction after he passed Rayden, kicking hard into the larger man's back.  
  
Rayden took the hit with a mild grunt, and then stabbed the still-sheathed sword toward Ranma. Ranma pushed off of Rayden, avoiding the attack, and then whipped around to aim a roundhouse for the other man's head. Rayden leaned back and blocked the atack his sword, and then did the same for the two lightning-quick slashes that followed it.  
  
*Kshsngk!* Ranma pushed forward with his katana a final time, and Rayden again blocked it, before pulling back and slamming the handle of his broadsword forward toward Ranma's head. Ranma swung his head to side to let it pass, then dashed backward easily.  
  
'Huh. He's a bit faster than I thought. With his hands, at least. I think he knows he can't out manuever me.' Ranma shifted stances and brought his katana to his side, pointed toward Rayden.  
  
Suddenly, Rayden pushed forward, his sheathed blade positioned like a cudgel.  
  
Ranma ducked under a horizontal strike, and then launched as many punches as he could manage into Rayden's gut before having to dodge a haymaker, followed by another sword attack. Ranma zipped back within Rayden's defenses, then hit him with a lightning-quick kick across the face.  
  
*Bok!* Rayden returned by slamming his forehead into Ranma's earning him his first hit in the battle. Rayden thrust his hand forward, aiming to grab his opponent's shirt, only to see Ranma recover with alarming speed and weave around the attack.  
  
*Shyk!* Rayden stumbled a bit as Ranma stabbed hard into his calf, breaking his defense.  
  
*Kshing!* *Kshing!* *Kshing!* *Kshing!* Ranma made a quickly series of cuts into his foe's back, then pulled back a bit to charge up his dragon fist technique.  
  
"Shadow break!" *Ka-TOOM!!* Ranma was caught off-guard as Rayden turned around and pushed a fist forward, driving a huge dark fireball right into him.  
  
"Ugh!" Ranma grunted as he took the full brunt of the attack, and rolled backward as he hit the ground.  
  
Rayden winced slightly as the wounds in his back began to settle. "You're pretty decent with that thing. It's time to stop playing around."  
  
Ranma nodded solemnly and stood up, his aura building around him. "You've kept that oversized butcher knife sheathed the whole time. I won't let you get away with taking me lightly." Ranma smirked slightly at that. That weird angel girl had taken him lightly, and Ranma had sent that one home with nothing but pain for her trouble.  
  
*Sssshng* Rayden slowly took his broadsword from its sheath, and a black glow began to encompass his form. "Darkrune's edge isn't meant for friendly matches, kid. If you die, I don't want it on my conscience that you didn't know what you were getting yourself into."  
  
"Shut up and fight. Blazing claw!" Ranma rushed forward into a series of sword slashes, each one being followed by streaks of searing flame. Surprisingly, Rayden managed to move his own blade fast enough to block each attack, and the flame strikes dissipated harmlessly as they passed near the broadsword.  
  
Rayden broke away, then reached a fist back. Shadow break!"  
  
*Ka-TOOM!!* Ranma jumped up into the air as the black energy punch blasted the ground he had just left. 'It's like my dragon fist, but a little more powerful and less focused...' Ranma reared back a fist as he started his descent.  
  
"Dragon fist!" *SshK* Rayden blocked his sword again, and the energies of the dragon punch parted harmlessly, leaving the demon hunter unscathed. But this time, Ranma was expecting it.  
  
Letting his katana drop to the ground, Ranma ducked low and brought out his staff, jabbing it up toward Rayden's stomach while activating it at the same time.  
  
*Toomph!* "Ugh!" Rayden doubled over as Ranma forced more pressure on the attack, but still managed to bring his sword down to the attack.  
  
Ranma easily stepped back from the vertical slash, and then moved in again, spinning his staff around in his right hand.  
  
*Thwack!* *Whack!* *Crack!* Ranma began to smack Rayden's head back and forth with his mithril staff in his right hand, while charging up his left hand behind him.  
  
"Dragon fist!" *Sh-KOOM!!* Rayden took the full brunt of the Hyoken school's signature strike, and flew back with enough force to shatter a few trees that were unlucky enough to be in his unexpected flight path.  
  
Ranma grinned as he looked over the smoldering scorch marks that identified the impact point of his attack. Then he saw Rayden get up from the ground, dusting off his charred coat.  
  
"Man, you can take it way better than you can dish it out," Ranma taunted, picking his katana back up and deactivating his staff.  
  
Rayden smiled disturbingly. "You 'aint seen nothing yet, kid. Dark crash!" Rayden's blade blazed with a dark blue light, and Rayden swung it high in a vertical slash as he charged forward.  
  
Ranma quickly saw the danger, and leapt back as a black aura manifested around the sword and swept forward with a dark energy.  
  
*Kwa-THOOM!!*  
  
"All right, try THIS!" Ranma darted in on Rayden's side, cutting him hard with a diagonal slash before executing a powerful roundhouse that sent Rayden flying across the small clearing that they were accidentally making in the forest.  
  
Rayden touched down with his hand, and then flipped himself upright before the force of Ranma's kick had worn off. Crouching slightly, Rayden held up one hand before him. "Burial!" A black flame burst open within his palm, and Rayden slammed that hand into the ground, sending three large waves of black energy zig-zagging across the clearing in Ranma's general direction.  
  
*BOOM!!* *BOOM!!* *BOOM!!*  
  
K sweatdropped as the fight pushed on, with both fighters putting out tremendous amounts of energy without doing significant damage to one another.  
  
"Shadow break!" *Ka-TOOM!!*  
  
"Flash fyre!" *Shree-yak!*  
  
"All they're doing is destroying the forest," K observed, wondering if there was some way he could assist in the battle. If only he were bigger! Then he'd show everyone why the metadragon race was singled out for extermination! This demon wouldn't stand a chance!  
  
"Dark crash! Shadow split!" *Kwa-THOOM!!* *Shyang!* *Ch-choom!* *Ch-choom!* *Ch-choom!*  
  
"Ha! You couldn't hit the side of a reaper! Blazing claw!" *Shying!* *K-Shnk!* *Thwoom!*  
  
"And YOU couldn't put one down! Shadow break!" *Ka-TOOM!!*  
  
"I wonder if Ranma can really beat him..." K wondered aloud, still perched on a tree (hopefully) out of the danger zone that the two combatants had created.  
  
*Bwak!* *Slam!* *K-shrak!* Rayden jerked back painfully as Ranma drove into him with everything he had, every movement followed by a searing blade of hot ki.  
  
'I... I don't know how much longer I can keep this up,' Ranma confessed to himself. While his opponent seemed to be a demon, and thus had significantly greater energy stores, Ranma had only his natural ki reservoir to draw from. Granted, that was still a relatively HUGE quantity of energy, but this fellow was testing its limits. On top of that, Ranma had long ago reasoned that keeping himself safe had a much higher priority than attacking. Ranma considered himself a pretty tough customer, but this guy could probably knock out a tank!  
  
*K-Shyk!* Ranma cut firmly under Rayden's collarbone, hoping to keep the larger man off-balance and finally wear him down. Unfortunately his opponent still hadn't had enough.  
  
Rayden shoved his body forward, slamming Ranma back and giving him more room to act. Both his hands gripped Darkrune firmly, and he closed his eyes as the dark magics flowed through his body and washed over his tainted soul. "Red blitzkriege!"  
  
"Grk!" Ranma jerked backward as Rayden shot forward, acting on pure instinct.  
  
*Kshing-Kshing-Kshing-Kshing-Kshing-Kshing* Rayden's blade sliced forward in a continual "X" pattern, blasting dirt up into the air as the slashes hit the much-abused dirt at his feet. Barely keeping in front of the attack, Ranma dodged furiously, trying to get enough distance to leap away out of range.  
  
*Kshing-Kshing-Kshing*  
  
Ranma flinched as strike finally tagged him on the leg, and time seemed to slow down as the next blow followed immediately after, moving even faster than Ranma's usually did.  
  
*K-tyang!*  
  
Smoke wafted off of Darkrune's edge as it grinded helplessly against the black material of Ranma's gauntlet, having been blocked completely.  
  
Ranma blinked in surprise. He had reasoned that blocking with his armored wrist would be slightly better than blocking with his unarmored one, but he had fully expected to lose a hand there.  
  
Rayden blinked. His red blitzkriege was blocked by some gaudy piece of armor?!  
  
'Here goes!' Taking full opportunity of the moment of shock, Ranma turned around, drew his katana, and then stabbed it hard backward just under Rayden's ribcage.  
  
*Kshwick!* "Gaugh!" Rayden blanched and pitched forward as the blade slowly but powerfully cut into him, eventually emerging out him back with a final push from Ranma.  
  
'Yes! Impaled 'im! The battle is mine!' Were Ranma's thoughts, right before he went sailing across the battlefield. *Thwack!!*  
  
*Wham!* Slamming hard into a tree, Ranma groaned and then looked back at his opponent. Rayden was glaring rather harshly at him, and was even now trying to pull the katana out of his gut.  
  
"No way," Ranma mumbled, getting up. "Hey! You can't fight anymore! You've got a freakin' sword in your gut! Give up already!"  
  
"Aw, shaddup!" Rayden yelled, struggling with the katana's hilt. How did that jerk get it all the way through, in the first place?  
  
*Snap!*  
  
Ranma blinked as Rayden stared dumbly at the handle in his palm, now separate from the blade still stuck in his abdomen.  
  
The swordsman sighed. "Man... this is just not my day..."  
  
"Hey! You jerk! That was my sword!"  
  
Rayden winced, then threw the katana hilt down in a fit of anger. "Well, who's the ass that put it there in the first place?!"  
  
Ranma grit his teeth. "If you woulda given up, then I woulda taken it outta ya!"  
  
"Give up? Ha!" Rayden snorted and stepped into another swordsman's stance, not aware of how stupid he looked impaled with a full-length blade. "Bring it on, small fry!"  
  
Ranma glared at the demon hunter, and began to slowly stalk forward.  
  
"Whoa, whoa! Let's just calm down here!" K quickly flew up onto the ground between the two fighters. "Let's just cool it! This fight's over!"  
  
"'Scuse me?" Rayden challenged, "do I look unconscious to you?"  
  
"No," K responded irritably, "but you look like you will be soon."  
  
"Ha!" Rayden barked, "bring it on! I've still gotta few rounds left in me!"  
  
Unfortunately for the demon hunter, Ranma was a little more willing to humor him than he expected, and with his attention turned toward the metadragon at his feet, he was ill prepared to bring his magic sword to his defense.  
  
"Dragon fist!" *Sh-KOOM!!*  
  
"Gyaaah!" Rayden was launched back from the force of the attack, and hit the ground rolling, leaving a trail of small fires and ash in his wake.  
  
Ranma grinned at his largely incapacitated opponent. At least, he was grinning until the man rolled out of the battlefield they had created, and then dropped out of sight. "What the?"  
  
"Waaaa-!" *Kshyk!*  
  
K blinked. "What happened? Did he fall?"  
  
"Fall where?" Ranma muttered, walking forward, "it's all just flat forest ground around here."  
  
Within a few feet of where the demon hunter had fallen, Ranma could see that there was actually a pit trap planted there, covered in branches and grass. A small hole on the edge indicated where Rayden had fallen through, and Ranma hurried and peered down into the hole.  
  
"Oh, geezus!" Ranma immediately turned away, holding his hands over his mouth.  
  
K blinked, then followed and looked into the hole. "Good mother of Elf and Evon! That's not right! That's just not right!!" K jerked his head away, and began to scrape his wings nervously against his outer armor scales, as if cleaning himself off.  
  
Shuddering, Ranma sat down at the base of one of the trees while holding his stomach. "I cut the guy, lit him on fire, and impaled him, but... ugh! Who would make a spike pit like that?!"  
  
"We did!"  
  
Ranma jerked his head to the side, somehow expecting that the high-pitched, cutesy voice belonged to a monster of hideous reputation. His aching body was extremely satisfied when he noted that it was actually a young forest nymph.  
  
The naked blue girl smiled at him, and Ranma sweatdropped.  
  
"YOU made that nasty thorn trap?" Ranma asked, his eye twitching.  
  
The little mystic nodded happily. "Hmm! Thank you for killing the evil demon man!"  
  
Ranma sighed. "Uh... yeah, don't mention it." Blushing slightly, he tried to avoid looking at the forest creature. She was young, and looked like an elementary schoolgirl, but seeing girls parade around naked had always been something that made Ranma nervous.  
  
"Was he really evil, though?" K questioned, walking up to Ranma and climbing onto his leg.  
  
Suddenly the nymph looked angry. "Yes! That mean man killed the forest mother! I'm glad the mean man's dead! Glad!"  
  
Ranma sighed again, and rolled his eyes. "Yeah, well, he's dead, and that's that. Even if he DID survive that fall, there's no way he'd get out of there without gutting himself." He turned to the nymph, annoyed. "Hey, look, I dealt with the demon guy, so I'm done here, okay? Just lemme rest for a while."  
  
"Oh, but you can't rest here!"  
  
Ranma blinked, and realized that the last outburst hadn't come from the nymph. It was much lower, and almost... sultry.  
  
"There! See? That's a lesser dryad! Those are the ones that look human!" K smiled up at the shamelessly naked mystic. He had always like forest mystics. So free and easygoing.  
  
Ranma turned around to look, and then jerked his head back to face forward, blushing furiously. The dryad, unlike the nymph, had reached a level of maturity, and with the exception of having leaves for hair, she looked just like a well-developed teenage girl with green skin.  
  
"So... uh... why can't I rest here?" Ranma asked nervously, trying to look at his feet. 'What's with these mystics, anyway? You don't see evon or elves runnin' around naked!'  
  
The dryad came up behind Ranma, and then swiftly embraced him around the neck, badly startling the terminally shy fighter.  
  
"It's all rough and bumpy out here, silly!" The dryad breathed into Ranma's ear, and after a moment, Ranma noted that her breath had a fresh pine scent. Weird. "A big, strong, hero like you deserves a good bed! And someone to share it with!" K snickered.  
  
Ranma's face turned solid red as the sexy tree creature destroyed any thoughts in his mind except escape or submission. "Y-You're ab-absolutely right! I think there w-was a village way over p-past the forest! Let's go, K!"  
  
Grabbing his companion by the beak to keep him from saying anything to make the situation worse, Ranma began to walk away unsteadily. His progress was complicated when thin vines burst from the ground and held his feet, stalling his progress long enough for the dryad to embrace him from behind again.  
  
"Oh, don't be like that! We have our very own village nearby!"  
  
Ranma shivered as she pressed her body firmly against his back, and almost didn't notice that K was thrashing about, trying to get air. He quickly let go.  
  
"S-Sorry."  
  
K snorted. "Yeah, you certainly are."  
  
The nymph from before ran up in front of Ranma, and then pointed into the forest. "Come on! We'll take you to the village!"  
  
The dryad giggled and pushed Ranma forward.  
  
Ranma sighed. "Oh well. This probably could have turned out worse." He stopped to think. "Hey K? Did we ever get that guy's name?"  
  
K blinked as he settled on Ranma's head (facing backward, so as to have a good view of the dryad). "No, we didn't."  
  
"That's a shame. He was a tough dude. I would've at least liked to know his name before he died."  
  
__________________________________________________________________________________  
  
Meanwhile, back at the thorn pit...  
  
"............................ H-Hey....... a little help? ............... Hello? ................"  
  
**********************************************************************************  
  
End Chapter 3 


	4. Battle at Flameheart

[The invasion of Earth realm is already well underway, and I'm nothing but pleased with the results. Already their struggles to survive the demonic onslaught have provoked several fascinating theories, and my analysis of their behavior and "technology" grows more complicated every day.]  
  
[What seems odd to me is the sheer dominance these humans have here on Earth. They have little to no physical superiority over even the primitive beasts that inhabit this sphere with them, yet they have for the most part mastered their environments and created means to thrive, using knowledge of natural laws that, in some cases, surpasses even my capability to understand. Were magic not so unfamiliar to them, these weak and fragile braincases might have even won the war by now.]  
  
[The humans' ideology, moreover, is based on the "fact" that they are inherently superior beings, and as such display a type of spirit and individuality that I've yet to find in humans from other realms. While this attitude is not surprising, given the level of isolation these people have enjoyed, I can't help but feel smug as those perceptions are shattered every passing day. This arrogance in their superiority has proven to be a great weakness, though it is one that I myself may yet fall prey to.]  
  
[Although more intensive study will begin once I have gathered more data, for now I turn toward the people of the Eastern continent. It has come to my attention that there are certain humans very different from the species average. Humans that display levels of prowess and capability far beyond others of their ilk. I have dubbed these particular humans "alphas", and look forward to their study.]  
  
[The concern, of course, is that the alphas will be wiped out before the Death March is concluded, one way or another. They seem rather quick to fight the demons, and while they're often successful at it, they're always killed eventually. On the other hand, the Death March itself seems to have drawn many alphas to the surface. Who knows how many there will be once the war is over and everything's sorted itself out?]  
  
[That's one of the most difficult things about this experiment, I suppose. Opening the Nexus gates, contrary to the rumors circulating around the councils, was not an action of predetermined intent or particular direction. While I certainly expected and deliberately provoked armies to emerge to conquer Earth realm, my intention is, for the most part, to lie back and see what's left once things have been sorted out.]  
  
[Of course, I can't exactly sit back and take NO part in all the chaos that I've so whimsically created. I have, on occasion, pulled some string here and there to lead one side to victory over the other, or let one group survive when it should have been exterminated.]  
  
[One such instance was a very recent study I've conducted using the "Phoenix" people of Mount Phoenix, and the alchemist stone Yarwell's Tear, a bauble I found in the Infernal realm and have been saving for such an occasion.]  
  
[The Phoenix are a race of humanoid avians whose entire race has been holed up in a mountain in China for some foolish reason. Not particularly powerful or intelligent, and even more arrogant than the humans, at first I was only interested in them as an intelligent race that shared a realm with humans, yet lived in a confined hole while their physical inferiors roamed free to expand and dominate. Eventually, however, I learned of their king, a demi-god known as Saffron.]  
  
[The term "demi-god" is typically used to describe any being of seemingly infinite power that is not accepted as a true god. In Threshgan, the term is commonly applied to the imperial black, gold, and ancient dragons, and throughout many realms, there are histories pockmarked with "demi-gods" that I would call liches. However, the term originated as a nicer word for "hybrid", in order to refer to those particular spawn of the less-than-divine and the infamous ancients, who were, for all intents and purposes, true gods themselves.]  
  
[It is my belief that Saffron is the bastard offspring of the ancient Gona and some manner of harpy that had evolved into the remotely more capable Phoenix. My sources have revealed that he possesses a nearly unlimited pool of mana to draw upon in battle, and possesses an aura that automatically regenerates wounds in combat, or resurrects him if slain. Such a creature would be invaluable to my studies.]  
  
[Of course, as foolish and stupid as these creatures are, it would hardly be wise to try to restrain a demi-god while conducting experiments. Naturally, I've found a better solution.]  
  
[An alchemist stone, as any decade-old mage neophyte knows, is a powerful mana channeling device that acts both as a catalyst and a mana circuit, storing and activating spells while changing and manipulating spells cast upon it. It took weeks, but I managed to configure the fire ruby with the proper enchantments to draw power specifically from Saffron, as well as alter his mind to make him more susceptible to future manipulations. It will take a matter of years, and will work only so long as the Phoenix king holds it, but Yarwell's Tear will eventually absorb an imprint of Saffron's magical aura, his zodiac asphyx (if he does indeed have one), his DNA, and even part of his soul for my own study. Meanwhile, it will act as a focus for his powers, encouraging the fool to channel more power through it and speed up the process.]  
  
[It still amuses me when I look back on it… the ignorant creatures actually accepted some magical rock from a complete stranger, and took it straight to their master. The humans at least display a proper suspicious distrust of magic. I can only wonder how these stupid birds managed to survive for this long.]  
  
[Hopefully I can think of a suitably amusing way to take the stone back. Something with irony… I will sleep on the matter.]  
  
- Entry 3999 of Doppler Thaeramon's personal scientific journal  
  
Nexus II  
  
by Black Dragon  
  
http://www.angelfire.com/anime5/fanficlair  
  
I will now do the disclaimer in haiku.  
  
Ranma is not mine.  
  
Rayden Shikodan is mine.  
  
Japanese is hard.  
  
Chapter 3  
  
Battle of Flameheart  
  
*****************************************************************************************  
  
"W-Well, I mean, it wasn't really m-much to dodge. Th-The guy, uh, he, um, kinda threw out a few e-energy blasts, b-but I didn't have much t-t-trouble..." Ranma tried to tell his story without stuttering badly, but to no avail. He just wasn't used to being surrounded by so many naked women (well, female humanoids, at least) at once. And they all just kept grinning at him.  
  
For the numerous lesser dryads and nymphs, the sight of a young man blushing like mad while trying to not to look at anything but the treetops was simply too adorable to resist. The fact that he presented an attractive figure and had heroically slain the demon hunter that had killed the forest mother had significantly increased his popularity as well, and now the biggest problem seemed to be dividing up the night so that all the mystics of appropriate age would get some time with the young warrior before he passed out from exhaustion.  
  
Humans were the mate of choice for nymphs and dryads (given that the species had no males of its own), and they had been in painfully short supply ever since the recent jakku attacks had begun. In addition to (literally) cutting the number of traveling merchants and caravans that were already rare in the mountain regions of China, Saffron's decision to entrust the forest mother with the Phoenix Stone had made her edgy and overly cautious, and she had scared off more than one company of young men seeking asylum from the undead assassins.  
  
"Here's some fresh water for you, Ranyaka!" A younger nymph (the equivalent of a pre-teen in human terms) handed the young fighter a large mug made of tightly entwined wooden vines, and giggled when the pigtailed boy looked at her blankly.  
  
"Ranyaka? Uh..."  
  
One of the older dryads chuckled, "Aw, the little one's already come up with a pet name for you. Isn't that sweet?"  
  
Ranma gulped. "P-Pet name?"  
  
The dryad that had originally led him to the mystic village smiled and nodded. "Oh, yes! 'Yaka' in old runais means 'love toy'!"  
  
Ranma's skin suddenly went several shades redder, and after a moment, he unceremoniously turned the mug of water upside-down over his head.  
  
*Splash!* 'Must stay cold, must stay cold, must stay cold...'  
  
"Oh dear! You're all wet! Here, let me help you!"  
  
"Take off that shirt, you'll catch a cold!"  
  
"Let's get these pants off you…"  
  
'Muststaycold, muststaycold, muststaycold…' Ranma began to twitch anxiously as the mystics began to advance on him, and suddenly shot up to his feet.  
  
"I've gotta… um… talk with my dragon! Yeah! Where's K?" Ranma's head jerked from side to side, searching desperately for an excuse to escape.  
  
One of the dryads blinked and pointed toward one of the bigger treehouses that were spread throughout the woodsy settlement. "I think he's settled in the main hall. He wanted something to eat, and-" she stopped speaking as the dust from Ranma's departure blasted into her face, and several of the other mystics sweatdropped.  
  
"What's with him?" The younger nymph asked, watching in wonder as Ranma bounded off of a tree and landed on a vine, running across it to get to the treehouses.  
  
"Don't worry, little one. We'll get him before the night is done. Still, I wonder why he's so shy?"  
  
The dryad that had brought Ranma to the village grinned as she lolled about lazily on a tree branch. "He's just inexperienced, that's all. But you should have seen him fight that demon knight! It was incredible!"  
  
"Speaking of which," the older dryad started, weaving a had through her willow-leaf hair, "are we sure the demon knight is dead? Those hamakku always survived our thorn pits, and he was strong enough to kill the forest mother."  
  
"I wouldn't worry about it," the other dryad responded, smirking. "He fell into the southern pit."  
  
The older dryad blinked, and her skin suddenly took on a much paler shade of green. "The big one?"  
  
Nod. "The big one."  
  
"Ah, well… I suppose that's that, then. I still don't know why you built that…" Though the forest was seeded with traps of varying lethality, the pit trap to the south had been constructed by a number of younger mystics with the intent of total destruction; even a lesser golem couldn't escape the series of spikes and blades without being torn apart. "But at least we don't have to worry about him anymore."  
  
"……………"  
  
"……………"  
  
"Did anyone else feel a cold chill just now?"  
  
_________________________________________________________________________________________  
  
Ranma jumped from one thatched roof from the other, grabbing hold of branches to make his way to the main hall as quickly as possible.  
  
The village of mystics was constructed entirely of treehouses, with the most elaborate and extravagant homes being constructed within the bases and knotholes of the largest trees, and the lesser dwellings being simple huts based upon criss-crossing tree branches and connected by vine rope ladders and bridges.  
  
The main hall was set in the largest tree in the village, and it seemed as if the tree itself had been grown to hold up the hut, giving it a resemblance to a massive claw holding up a jewelry box.  
  
Needless to say, Ranma was nervous and confused at the moment, and really wanted to find K so he could he could be subjected to the familiar sensations of humiliation and ridicule. Besides, Ranma knew that the metadragon would hate to pass up such a ripe opportunity to tease him. And he was far more comfortable dealing with smart-ass dragons than amorous, man-hungry women.  
  
Grabbing a low-hanging branch, Ranma swung himself under and then used his momentum to shoot upward toward his destination. Latching onto the wall of the main hall, he scaled sideways until his hand felt a window, at which point he pulled himself over it and slipped into the hut feet first.  
  
"You know, there's a ladder and a door on other side of the hall. You DO know how to use doors, right?" K deadpanned after watching Ranma swoop into the room like a burglar.  
  
The pigtailed warrior looked around for a moment. In the middle of the hall was a large table covered in various types of food, from apples to salted pork. K was squatting atop the table as well, and was putting away an admirable amount of food, considering the number of fruit scraps and meat-stripped bones lying in a pile beside him. The only mystics in the room were a few sprites, who seemed stunned at seeing someone who was completely welcome in the hall break in from a largely inaccessible window.  
  
Ranma let out a breath he was holding. Sprites were wind mystics and akin to fairies; thus they were all too small to try anything weird. "Yo, K? Can we talk? Like, in private?"  
  
"Sure. Ladies, you mind?" The sprites all made cute pouting expressions, and a few of them winked at the kid dragon as they flew out of room.  
  
Ranma stared at the sprites as they left, then turned his head to stare at K. "That's just wrong."  
  
K raised a steel eyebrow. "Well, someone's mind is in the gutter. Strange, considering it's yours."  
  
Ranma shook his head and took a seat at the table. "Sorry. I'm a little worked up right now." He immediately began to stuff his face full of grapes and buns, leaving K a bit confused as to what was wrong.  
  
A short evaluation of his manner of dress (ties on his armor undone, pants hanging down slightly on one side, soaking wet) and the way he was acting, nervous but not really afraid, led the draconian scholar to the correct conclusion.  
  
"Girl problems?" K asked, smirking.  
  
Ranma simply nodded, and ripped off a leg of goat from the middle of the buffet.  
  
"You know, most guys come for help when they can't get chicks to notice them, or can't seem to get lucky. Why don't you just give in and stop whining about your popularity?" K reasoned, stopping to lap up a few grapes in his beak.  
  
Ranma swallowed a mouthfull of meat, then sighed. "It's not that simple... sure, it'd be easy to just... you know... and... well..." he sighed again. "I don't know. I've given in before, and it just gets so messy."  
  
K raised an eyebrow. "Literally?"  
  
"Stop that," Ranma deadpanned.  
  
K smirked. "Aw, c'mon! Is it because they're dryads? You know, with the right protection, the chances of getting a splinter are negligible!"  
  
Ranma twitched. "One more, metal mouth... just one more..."  
  
K cocked his head to one side. "It really bothers you, huh?"  
  
Ranma nodded, his tension deflating. "I just have this feeling, deep down inside, when I get that close to girl, that I'm gonna regret it if I go all the way."  
  
K thought about that for a moment, tapping a talon on the table. "Well, you're not a virgin, are you?"  
  
"Nope."  
  
"So, you've had this feeling and done 'it' anyway?"  
  
Ranma shrugged. "Hey, I'm still human."  
  
"Whatever," K dismissed his excuses. "How did it work out?"  
  
Ranma stopped to think about that, and cupped his chin in his hand. "Well.. three out of five times I ended up regretting it. A lot."  
  
"Ah. Bad odds, huh?"  
  
Ranma nodded. "Besides, it's kind of a leap, you know? I think I should at least take them out to dinner or something first."  
  
K just sighed and scanned the pile of food for something tart. "You're hopeless, you know that?"  
  
Ranma grumbled a bit as he watched his companion grab a green apple in his beak and bite into it. "Hey, don't even start. I trust my instincts because they're usually right. If something like this comes along that's too good to be true, it probably is."  
  
*Gulp* "Or maybe you're just being so cautious that you're passing up the opportunity of a lifetime for no reason. You'll barely hesitate before taking on pseudo-dragons, but find yourself backed into a corner when a girl invites you under the sheets?"  
  
Ranma stood still for a moment, his left eye twitching slightly as K's statement sunk in. Then he turned away sharply.  
  
"Wait a minute! What the hell am I doing? Asking a baby dragon for advice on women! I must be out of my mind!"  
  
K rolled his eyes. "What worries me is that after the conversation we just had, now I'm sure that I know more about romance than you do."  
  
"Shut up, metalhead," Ranma muttered, grabbing up some more food. Despite his annoyance, it was a great relief to be back on familiar territory. Verbal battles were nothing compared to matters of the heart.  
  
K turned his head as he heard the vine ladder creaking, and smirked. "Speaking of which, I think your little harem has come for you."  
  
"Oh, geez!" Ranma started panicking, and began looking around for hiding places. "You gotta help me! Just come up with an excuse or something for me!"  
  
"All right, all right..." K mumbled as the naked humanoids started piling into the hall. "Pardon me ladies, may I have a moment of your time?"  
  
The dryads and nymphs all stopped rushing toward Ranma, and glanced at the metadragon uncertainly.  
  
K nodded to them. "I really think you should hear this before you... try anything with my friend over there."  
  
The mystics all glanced toward Ranma, who waved pathetically at them from the opposite side of the buffet table.  
  
Ranma put his hand down, mentally berating himself for being so pitiful that he had to get a talking lizard to get him out of a jam. Still, he was sure that something would go wrong if he let his guard down and gave in. He had felt the same thing in the Amazon village, and might have well been devoured by that wyrm if he had been "distracted" with Shampoo.  
  
As K spoke quietly with the girls, Ranma frowned and rubbed his chin. Come to think of it, he HAD been feeling more edgy than usual lately, and it wasn't his hormones. Ever since the Amazon village, he had been encountering small, wandering death squads, usually composed of lizardmen or grends. That in and of itself didn't bother him, as he must have fought hundreds of raiders over the course of his lifetime, but these death squads almost seemed to be targeting him specifically. Whether it was the frequency of how often they found him, the veracity and swiftness of their attacks, or the fact that some of them had a sketchy description of him and K on them, Ranma just knew that someone out there had it in for him.  
  
The fact that he now possessed some magic rock that a number of people wanted also worried him, but at least he knew what that was about. And once he hocked the gem for a new katana, that whole deal would be over and done with anyway.  
  
'Hmmmm... maybe something with a mithril edge... or, if I can find a mage that really wants it, maybe I can even get the whole blade made of mithril!' Making a staff of the super-tough alloy was one thing, but tempering a blade, especially one as delicate and finely constructed as that of the katana, was worth far more than most fighters could ever afford. He'd probably need to find some other treasure before he could get one like that. And there was always the difficulty of actually finding a swordsmith that worked with mithril to consider...  
  
Ranma was startled out of his thoughts by a series of gasps from across the room, and gulped as all the mystics stared at him in horror and sympathy.  
  
'Uh oh... what did that rusty gecko tell them?'  
  
He didn't get time to ask his companion, as very quickly, the dryad that had first led him to the village sprinted the distance between them and tackled him onto the floor.  
  
"Oh Ranma! I'm so sorry! I didn't know! You poor, poor man!" The nubile, naked, teenage girl squeezed the pigtailed boy to her tightly, tears slowly leaking from the corners of her eyes.  
  
Ranma, for his part, was too shocked and nervous to even notice that the tree mystic was crying. Also, his body was having a very natural and understandable reaction to having an attractive, naked, teenage-equivalent girl rubbing up against him.  
  
"Who would do such a horrible thing! To think, that you can't even..." The dryad trailed off for a moment, then blinked. Then she looked down. Then she turned toward K. "If he's a eunuch, then what's that?"  
  
K bigsweated as all the mystics began frowning at him. "Uh... did I say eunuch? I meant, um, what's that other word... impotent! Yeah!"  
  
Ranma sweatdropped. 'That moron.'  
  
The dryad stared at K for a moment, then looked down again at Ranma's lap. Then she looked at K again.  
  
"I give up. You're on your own, Ranma," K conceded, sliding his wings over his head to escape the disapproving stares of the mystics.  
  
"You're useless!" Ranma yelled as he tried to struggle out of the dryad's grasp.  
  
"Ranma, why are you trying to keep us away? Don't you want to be with us?" The dryad asked softly, staring Ranma straight in the eyes.  
  
'Oh, you have got to be &$^%!+# kidding me...' looking past the naked green girl that was clinging to him, Ranma saw the other dryads and nymphs, many of them a good deal older-looking than the first dryad, on the verge of tears. 'No! Gotta think fast!'  
  
"It's... it's not that I don't like you or anything," Ranma began slowly, managing to gently pry the busty tree mystic off of him, "or that I have anything against non-humans..." that was technically true, although the fact that the girls weren't human reinforced his reluctance. If he had to do the deed, he always preferred women within his own species.  
  
Ranma gulped, and an idea suddenly popped into his head. "It's just that... I'm married!" Ranma smiled brightly at his own brilliance. Why hadn't he thought of something so simple sooner? "And even though I know that my wife'll probably never find out, it just wouldn't be right to fool around on the side." He nodded seriously, sure that they'd buy it.  
  
"Oh, that's okay, we don't mind!" One of the nymphs assured him.  
  
Ranma sweatdropped. "Uh... I meant that I'd mind." Ranma clarified.  
  
"We don't mind that, either," an older dryad said, winking at him.  
  
'Oh crap.' Ranma threw away backup plans C and D and immediately jumped to the all-purpose Saotome special solution: run away. Quickly scanning the walls for windows, he catalogued all the possible escape routes.  
  
"EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!!!"  
  
Everybody in the main hall jerked to attention at hearing a shriek come from outside, and Ranma immediately jumped to his feet.  
  
"The hell with this! Someone's in trouble!" Rushing away from one heroic "obligation" to another, Ranma leapt through the window he had entered through, ignoring the protests of the mystics.  
  
K sweatdropped as he took to the air and flew toward the main entrance. 'Isn't that sort of thing how he got into this mess in the first place?'  
  
_________________________________________________________________________________________  
  
"EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!!!" The sprite's tiny lungs quickly ran out of air as she screamed as loud as possible, and began to pant heavily from the exertion.  
  
The figure in front of her twitched, gently massaging his forehead. "Couldja scream a little louder? I think there are still some people in Taiwan that didn't hear you."  
  
The sprite turned around, and took another deep breath. "HELP!!! ZOMBIE!!! KILL IT!! KILL IT!!"  
  
The man twitched again, and a vein popped up on his head. "I am NOT a zombie! It's just normal battle damage, all right? It'll get better!"  
  
"QUICK!!! SOMEBODY KILL IT!!! IT TALKS!!!"  
  
"Would you cut it-eh?" He turned suddenly as he heard someone shout a short battle cry, and only managed to glimpse the sole of somebody's boot before he was kicked away into a tree.  
  
*Wham!* "Ow! Ugh..."  
  
Ranma backflipped as he rebounded off of the intruder's face, and landed in a crouch, his hand on the hilt of his gun.  
  
His eyes widened when he got a good look at who he had kicked. "Wh-What? You again?!" Then Ranma winced. It was the same man he had fought earlier, who had supposedly killed the high dryad for the Phoenix stone. While he was apparently alive, to Ranma it looked like he shouldn't be. His body was covered in bloody cuts and gashes that looked to have been hastily and poorly cleaned. His coat was torn, had many crimson stains, and was sopping wet. And worst of all, the seemingly indestructible swordsman still hadn't removed the katana blade protruding from his stomach. "That looks like it hurts."  
  
"Your sympathy is heartwarming," Rayden deadpanned, still on the ground.  
  
Ranma scratched the back of his head, ignoring the sprite that was clinging to his back trying to hide. "So, what're you doing here? I'm surprised you're even alive. Shouldn't you be healing up or something?"  
  
"Yeah, well, that's why I'm here, actually..." Rayden mumbled, getting up and fingering the broken sword in his gut. "I can't get this thing out of me. I was... uh... sort of hoping you could help me out."  
  
Ranma stared at the demon hunter, then rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "Well... I don't know. How do I know you aren't here trying to catch me with my guard down and steal the Phoenix stone?"  
  
Rayden blinked. "The what?"  
  
"The Phoenix stone," Ranma repeated.  
  
"What's a Phoenix stone, and why would I want one?" Rayden asked, genuinely curious. Phoenixes were known for coming back from the dead; maybe Ranma had something that could heal him? He'd make a full recovery in a few days anyway (provided he ever got the katana blade out of his abdomen), but he didn't like walking around in a forest full of hostile creatures while so heavily injured.  
  
Ranma stared for a moment at his former opponent. "You're telling the truth, aren't you?"  
  
Rayden blinked. "About what?"  
  
"Never mind," Ranma muttered, moving his hands away from his weapons. "Let's get that blade out of you." He clapped his hands together several times, then crouched down on one knee, as if he was about to run a race.  
  
"Hey!" The sprite protested angrily, "you can't help him! He's evil!"  
  
"Just a little," Rayden assured her, waving off the comment. " 'Sides, this don't involve you, small fry." Then he frowned as he watched Ranma. "Uh... hey, how exactly are you going to-"  
  
"Don't move," Ranma ordered. Then he took off like a bullet, running at full speed and jumping into the air, immediately moving to perform a flying kick.  
  
"Wh-What the hell?!" Rayden shouted, surprised at being subjected to an attack rather than first aid, or maybe surgery. As it was, he was too weak to move out of the way in time, and could only squeeze his eyes shut and hope that the pigtailed fighter would make it quick.  
  
*Wham!!* Ranma slammed into Rayden right over the broken end of the blade, his kick angled almost straight forward.  
  
The swordsman let out a gasp as he felt the impaling piece come out the back of him, and staggered backward clumsily as Ranma flipped upright.  
  
Rayden blinked, then stood straight up, smiling as he felt his back fall into position without scraping against anything that shouldn't be there. "Oh yeah! That's way better!" Then he noticed Ranma staring at him oddly. "What?"  
  
"How can you even walk right now?" Ranma asked, feeling a little queasy as he watched blood ooze from the now-open sword wound. "There's no way you should be alive right now. I mean, the sword wound, fine, but that spike pit..."  
  
"Ah. Yeah, it was pretty rough," Rayden agreed, clapping his hands together as if dusting them off. "But I've taken worse. 'What doesn't kill you makes you stronger,' and all that."  
  
"Well, I'm afraid you're not getting any stronger today," a powerful, feminine voice said.  
  
Rayden looked up and sighed. Ranma turned around to see an older dryad glaring hard at the swordsman.  
  
"Uh, look, if you still wanna kill this guy, that's your business, but I don't really have anything against him any more. Is that cool?" Ranma asked tentatively, scratching the back of his head. On the one hand, he didn't want to look like a coward or anything, but on the other hand, he was really starting to feel sorry for this guy. Especially as it seemed he wasn't after the magic rock like everyone had assumed.  
  
The dryad nodded from her position upon a tree branch. "It's all right, Ranma. You've beaten him once, and thanks to that, he's more than weak enough for us to handle. You have our eternal gratitude."  
  
"Uh... yeah. Great," Ranma mumbled, looking around for K. Wasn't he with the mystics?  
  
"As for you," the dryad intoned imperiously, pointing a finger at Rayden, "you will be disposed of with proper punishment for one who would desecrate our forest!"  
  
She made a quick gesture with her hands, and Rayden blinked as several thick, thorny vines burst from the ground, swiftly wrapping around his legs. He looked down at the tendrils, then looked up, a bored expression on his face. "'Proper punishment' huh? So, what, are you gonna chop me up and burn me? 'Cause the samurai kid already tried that, and it didn't work."  
  
"Silence!" The dryad shouted. She made another hand gesture, laying her palm flat down and then slowly lowering it. In response, the tree branch she was on gently moved downward, stretching to deposit its mistress safely onto the ground.  
  
Behind her, several other dryads of various ages walked from the numerous huts and descended to the ground, either by the same method as their spokeswoman, or by grabbing onto hanging vines that similarly acted to transport their passengers.  
  
Ranma sighed and looked up to try and spot K (mostly to avoid gazing at the abundant level of bare female flesh present). He was getting worried now. If nothing else, the metadragon wouldn't miss a chance to watch a fight like this.  
  
"Arise, treants!" The dryad shouted, raising her arms into the air, one palm aligned atop the other. Behind her, every other dryad did exactly the same thing, and the whole group of them started glowing with a dark green aura.  
  
Rayden glanced around as a number of low-pitched, hollow groans erupted from the surrounding forest. "Treants, huh? Well, why not? I needed something to warm up on after getting that piece a' metal outta me." He stretched slightly, ignoring the trails of blood that soaked into his trench coat.  
  
All at once, the trees surrounding the village began to move, their branches shifting and twisting into arms with numerous raking claws. Their roots burst from the ground violently, twisting together into thick, powerful appendages that resembled a spider's legs.  
  
Rayden whistled to himself as he waited patiently for the animated trees to arrive. The village wasn't very big, but treants were pretty slow. Their legs had to be carefully manipulated so that the trees could move, and even once that was mastered, if the creatures went too fast the large, heavy heads of the treants would cause them to topple over. "Could we hurry this up? I still need to dress these wounds, you know."  
  
"Silence!" the head dryad shouted. Then she jabbed a finger at the swordsman as the first treant came within striking range. "Treants, attack!"  
  
*Kreeeoooooo* A creaking moan came from one of the forest guardians as it lifted one large branch to the attack.  
  
At the same moment, Rayden reached for the broadsword strapped onto his back, not even bothering to free himself from the vines that held him immobile.  
  
*Kshing!* *Slash!* *Crack!*  
  
Ranma winced as the "battle" began, and shook his head at the foolishness of it all.  
  
*Shrak!* *Smash!* "Shadow break!" *Ka-kroom!!*  
  
"*Sigh* The guy killed the powerful dryad, nearly fought me to a standstill, and survived a drop in that nasty spike pit, and they think a few walking trees are gonna take him out?" Ranma turned away. This was officially not his problem any more. "I'm outta here."  
  
"W-Wait! No! Don't go!" A nymph ran up to him in a panic, and Ranma quickly averted his eyes slightly.  
  
'Dammit, why are they always naked?' "What? This has nothing to do with me."  
  
"B-But you can't leave! Who'll punish the evil demon man?" The nymph asked, trembling.  
  
It was quite fortunate that Ranma was deliberately facing away from the young mystic, or else he very well might have been swayed when seeing her large eyes shining with unshed tears. "I already punished him. You see all this blood on the ground here? That's all his."  
  
"But... But... he's killing all those trees!" The nymph protested.  
  
Ranma sweatdropped, and looked back at the battle. Rayden still hadn't left the hold of the entangling vines (Ranma knew it was purely a decision on the swordsman's part; he was more than strong enough to break free), and was on his fourth treant.  
  
The tree creature attacked, and Rayden cut into the strike, shredding its claw-like branches. A second, more powerful stroke cut cleanly through the tree's body, and the treant toppled over in two.  
  
Ranma turned away and shrugged. "They started it." He walked away from the mystic, ignoring her. It wasn't that he didn't sympathize at all for them, but after what he'd seen from the guy, Ranma had to guess that the mystics weren't in any real danger that didn't come from the swordsman acting purely in self-defense. Of course, if he was wrong, there would be hell to pay, but for now he just wanted to find K and leave.  
  
He had gathered his pack and walked some distance before he finally spotted his companion, who was looking rather stressed out. K was flying in circles up near the forest canopy, holding a position on the edge of the village.  
  
"There you are! Were you eating back in the lodge the whole time?" Ranma asked, frowning.  
  
"Huh? Oh! There you are!" K said, surprised at seeing his companion again so soon. "Did you take care of whatever you left for?" he asked, zipping down to settle firmly on Ranma's shoulder.  
  
"Nah. It looks like he can take care of himself," Ranma muttered.  
  
K blinked. "Huh?"  
  
"It was that guy that we thought died in the spike pit. He got better."  
  
"Ah. Well, whatever. We've got trouble."  
  
Ranma blinked, and then massaged his head. "Aw, man... now what?"  
  
K sighed. "Remember that winged chick that attacked when we found the Phoenix stone?"  
  
Ranma raised an eyebrow. "She's back? Already? It's not even nightfall!"  
  
K shook his head. "No, she's not back. But a few of her friends are."  
  
Ranma raised an eyebrow, and then craned his head up.  
  
Four armored figures flew into view above, their wings flapping rapidly as they search the forest canopy below.  
  
Ranma rubbed his chin in thought. "It's weird... I thought these guys were angels at first... but somehow they're a little more bird-like." He raised an arm and waved, quickly catching the attention of one of the winged soldiers.  
  
"What are you doing?! They'll kill us!" K shouted.  
  
Ranma shrugged. "They might try. Or, they might be looking for that other girl that attacked. She might have been a thief or something."  
  
The soldier that noticed him appeared to shout something to his companions, and then took out a crossbow and armed it.  
  
"Well, damn," Ranma mumbled, letting his hand drop.  
  
"Told you," K said miserably.  
  
*Thwip!* The projectile sailed through the air, and Ranma sighed and brought his hand up, plucking the heavy bolt out of the air calmly.  
  
K's eyes widened as Ranma snapped the bolt in his hand, and gulped. "You're not... planning on fighting all of them, are you?"  
  
Ranma grinned and sped forward, rushing into a small clearing that offered a much better battleground for flying opponents (he had to draw them down in order to defeat them, after all). "Of course I am. I can handle four flyers, no problem."  
  
"Uhm-" K was silenced as Ranma skidded to a stop, being forced to dig into the shoulder guards of Ranma's leather armor to keep from being thrown from his perch.  
  
Ranma smirked and looked up to see if his opponents had tracked him. Then his smirk faded.  
  
"I was trying to tell you," K said miserably, "there's about thirty of them, not four."  
  
"You're on a streak today, I see," Ranma mumbled as his opponents began descending. Every one of the Phoenix soldiers was well-armored and armed, and apparently still light enough to fly. The speed with which they approached didn't bode well, either.  
  
'And my sword's broken. Crud.' This was definitely a bad time to take on a band of what looked like well-trained soldiers.  
  
Nonetheless, Ranma removed his mithril staff from his belt and extended it, moving into a defensive stance.  
  
'It probably doesn't matter. The staff's better for fighting multiple opponents anyway. If I can just surprise them and then draw them into the woods...' Ranma was still planning on winning this fight, but now the emphasis was on tactics rather than skill. If these birds managed to surround him for long, his mediocre leather armor wouldn't do much to blunt a thrust from one of those scimitars.  
  
"K, leave," Ranma commanded stiffly.  
  
K stumbled, and then turned toward Ranma, gaping. "What? Leave? I can't leave you!"  
  
Ranma grimaced. "And what are you going to do if you stay? Do you have any helpful advice on dealing with angels?"  
  
K blinked. "Uh... well, actually, I don't think they're angels..."  
  
Ranma raised an eyebrow. "Then what are they?"  
  
"Urm, I'm... I'm not completely sure..." K admitted sheepishly.  
  
Ranma sighed. "K, just go! I can't fight this battle if I have to worry about you too." Seemingly having dismissed the metadragon already, Ranma threw his pack into a nook under a tree near the edge of the clearing, taking careful note of where it was.  
  
K gave a long, sorrowful stare at Ranma, then shook his head slowly and gently took off toward the woods. It just wasn't fair! Ranma had saved his life, and he had been little but a burden to him!  
  
'Ranma, I swear, someday I'll make it up to you! I promise!'  
  
The first of the flying soldiers finished circling, and cautiously landed a few meters in front of Ranma. Brandishing a long sword and a shield, the soldier took up an offensive position, and then spoke.  
  
"I'm to let you know that there's still hope for you to leave this place alive. If you surrender the Phoenix stone now, there's no reason to waste anyone's life."  
  
Ranma stood up straight and fingered his chin, as if considering it. "As thoughtful as it is of you to offer to save me the trouble of beating the feathers out of you nimrods... I'm going to have to decline." He smirked and twirled his staff around in one hand flamboyantly, as if daring the soldier to make a stab at him.  
  
The soldier twitched, and waved his shield in the air. At once, two other soldiers dove down to the clearing, landing heavily on their feet.  
  
"I gave you fair warning, human! We'll make you suffer for-"  
  
Before he could complete his taunt, Ranma darted to the side, making as if to escape. The soldiers immediately moved to hit his rear before he made it into the forest, and Ranma smirked as he moved his staff perpendicular to his body.  
  
Killing his momentum and then dashing backward, Ranma smashed two of the soldiers in the face before they could adjust to his change in speed. The third ducked under the staff, then stabbed at Ranma, which he dodged by twisting away and moving into a sweep with the staff that threw the Phoenix off his feet.  
  
*Poom!* *Poom!* Two more of the Phoenix landed on either side of him, and wasted no time before charging their opponent.  
  
Ranma rushed the nearest opponent, overwhelming the soldier with the speed of his staff strikes and eventually landing an incapacitating blow to the winged fighter's head. He then pushed his staff back over his shoulder and dug it into the ground, barely blocking the swing of a battleaxe that was aimed for his back.  
  
With his staff stuck in the ground, Ranma pushed toward the other soldier and used it to swing a back kick into his armored head, sending the hapless grunt flying into one of the other soldiers that was just recovering.  
  
'Oh great, and now the others are getting up...' Ranma watched as three more Phoenix descended to land in front of him, and yanked his staff from the ground.  
  
"Flash fyre!" Streaks of flame rushed through the small clearing, knocking two of the soldiers over while others bore the attack and rose to their feet regardless.  
  
Glancing behind him, Ranma saw one of his foes diving in an aerial attack, and backflipped upward, timing his jump perfectly to land on the soldier's back and drive him hard into the Earth.  
  
Ranma parried several attacks with his staff, snapping the mithril pole quickly at his opponents to keep them at bay.  
  
'A lot of them have landed... I think it's time I took 'em out.'  
  
Ranma pulled back, skidding over the ground and putting his staff over his right shoulder as he crouched.  
  
'Boy, is that dork with the sword going to be surprised if he picks a fight with me again,' Ranma grinned as his aura built around him, with streaks of red circling his forearms.  
  
"Blazing claw! Silver blitzkrieg!" Ranma's form blurred, and his form was suddenly replaced by an almost ghost-like apparition that pushed into the crowd of soldiers with reckless speed. All around the blur, blades of fiery ki cut and slashed into Phoenix, sweeping into the crowd too quickly for them to dodge.  
  
Ranma's skidded to a stop on the other end of the clearing, having blasted through a majority of the soldiers that had blocked his path. In his right hand he spun his staff around, letting the last energies of the blazing claw technique fizzle out on the ends of the staff in a neat-looking red sawblade effect.  
  
"That was easy. You dorks better shape up, or you'll all get eaten by giant spiders or something," Ranma wagged a finger in the air as if lecturing them.  
  
Suddenly he jumped back as a bladed chakra zipped through the space his neck had occupied, and he sweatdropped.  
  
"Whoa... okay, that was a little too close... GYAH!!" Ranma jerked to one side as a spear jabbed for his back, and whipped around with a back kick that dented that soldier's helmet in.  
  
Sensing another series of attacks in the moment of distraction, Ranma turned quickly and deflected two sword slashes with his staff before raising it above his head to block an axe strike to his head.  
  
As a soldier jabbed his sword forward, Ranma dropped down onto his back, and then spun on the ground as he brought his staff up, tripping the two soldiers in front of him and striking the one behind in the arm. Closing on the Phoenix still standing, Ranma blocked an axe chop with his staff, and then he ducked down and swept the Phoenix's legs out from under him before catching him on one end of the staff, and using it to catapult him into one of his recovering companions.  
  
Ranma dashed away from another attack, and then used his staff to deflect several more chakras sailing down at him from above.  
  
*K-shing!* *K-shing!* "C'mon you guys! I'm getting bored!"  
  
Ranma laughed for a moment, then quickly swatted a crossbow bolt out of the way. A glance upward revealed a number of Phoenix fitting bows and arming crossbows; not a big problem for someone who was adept at dealing with guns, unless one considered the enemies on the ground as well.  
  
'Even the ones I hit rushing through the field are getting back up... I guess its time to move on.'  
  
Ranma started running backward, spinning the staff in his hands around in a circle in front of him, creating a shield that deflected several bolts and arrows before he reached the edge of the clearing, rushing into the web of trees and out of sight.  
  
Ranma knew very well that his opponents wouldn't give up so easily; after all, they had him outnumbered, and he was tiring.  
  
He couldn't help but snicker as that thought crossed his mind. "Come and get it, ya overgrown turkeys!"  
  
Hearing several of the commanders shouting among rustling foliage, Ranma leapt up into one of the thicker networks of tree branches, positioning himself for an ambush. This was going to be too easy.  
  
The first of the Phoenix broke through the bushes, obviously encumbered by his wings when trying to move through the thick woods. Five more companions joined him, four of them sporting bruises and settling burns that they tried to ignore as they slowly made their way through the forest, searching the brush for their quarry.  
  
"I can't believe Saffron's stupid rock fell into the hands of that wretched human," one of the men growled, flexing his wings irritably.  
  
"I can't believe how fast that little twerp is," another commented, holding his head, "or how strong." His helmet was dented, and Ranma suspected that if these feathered morons had heard of any technology more advanced than a catapult, he would have needed something stronger than aspirin to fix up his skull.  
  
"SSH! I heard something!" The leader froze and slowly scanned the treeline, his companions remaining perfectly still.  
  
Up in his tree, Ranma frowned. Had he made any noise? He was being perfectly quiet, even making sure that his breathing stayed soft and soundless.  
  
*Crick* *Crack* The six soldiers blinked as mounds of dirt began to rise at their feet, breaking the hard surface of dried Earth.  
  
"What in the-"  
  
*Boom!* *Boom!* *Boom!* *Boom!* *Boom!* *Boom!* Under each Phoenix a green, fleshy vine burst from the ground before wrapping around him, coiling instantly around the waist, legs, and neck.  
  
"What the hell?!"  
  
"Cut them off!"  
  
"Does that little rat know magic?"  
  
Up in his tree, Ranma blinked. Were the dryads helping him out?  
  
*CHA-SCHINK!* Simultaneously, all the vines sprouted dozens of thin, spiny needles, instantly piercing their prisoners in several places at once.  
  
With the vines around their necking having suddenly sprouted thorns too quickly for the soldiers to react, not a one could even give a final scream as their blood sprayed across the forest floor.  
  
Ranma blinked again. "Whoa... harsh."  
  
Looking around nervously, Ranma could see no obvious source from which the vines could have originated, and wondered if he should really be hiding in a piece of foliage in a place like this.  
  
Jumping out of the tree, Ranma landed in a crouch, and stared cautiously at the thorny vines and they writhed around their victims.  
  
After a moment, the vines stopped moving and went limp, and a moment later, the healthy-looking green whips hardened into brown wood, dead as the corpses they still entangled.  
  
Then he heard voices further off into the woods, and considered jumping back into the tree.  
  
'Nah. I'll take 'em head on this time.'  
  
Though the trees and bushes were too thick for him to see anything, he could hear his enemies just fine as they struggled through the forest.  
  
"Did anybody else hear that?"  
  
"Hear what?"  
  
"I don't know. It sounded like... like a steel trap going off, or something. I'm not quite sure."  
  
"It's just the human. He's around here somewh-what the?!"  
  
"Vines?! The hell?!"  
  
"Cut them off and keep moving! This is just a distraction!"  
  
"Augh! It's around my neck! The stupid-"  
  
*CHA-SCHINK!*  
  
Ranma paled slightly and glanced down at the ground.  
  
"Hordes of enemies with swords and spears I can deal with... magic is another thing entirely." He began scanning the ground more carefully, searching for any regions that might burst open.  
  
"Ranma? Ranma!"  
  
He blinked. "K? That you?"  
  
The metadragon flew out of the brush after a moment, orienting on his companion's voice. "THERE you are! Come on! You've got to see this!"  
  
Ranma looked back at the Phoenix corpses. "Does it have anything to do with that?"  
  
K shrugged his wings. "Probably. You'll have to check it out though. I think this girl needs help." The metadragon quickly launched himself off the branch in the other direction.  
  
Ranma followed a short distance until he reached an odd clearing in the forest. What made it odd was that there were large, glowing crystals jutting out of the ground in a perfect circle around an odd-looking young dryad. What made her odd-looking was that she had webs of pulsing gray veins all over her head, neck, chest, and arms, and that her natural perfectly green skin was pockmarked with slimy black spots.  
  
"Ewwww..." Ranma mumbled under his breath. "Uh, hey! You need some help there?"  
  
The dryad slowly turned to look at Ranma, and the pigtailed adventurer blinked in surprise as he saw that her eyes were blank and fogged over.  
  
"You who possesses the Phoenix stone," the dryad spoke too softly to be heard, but her voice was immediately amplified somehow, and boomed from all directions, as if coming from the forest. "You must go to he who seeks it."  
  
Ranma stared at the young mystic oddly. "Huh? What are you talking about? You need some healing or something first!"  
  
The dryad shook her head slowly. "My time on this realm is over... I have managed to slay the Phoenix soldiers, those servants of the Phoenix king that were pursuing you, but my power has almost exhausted."  
  
"Whoa, whoa! Just hold on! We can get you to a healer or something!" Ranma stepped forward and reached a hand out toward her.  
  
A heavy sigh erupted from the surrounding woods. "Foolish human... there is no hope for me, but there is still hope. The Phoenix king will not stop until he has recovered the stone to complete his power. If you wish to help... me..." the words started coming slower, and she began to tremble violently, "then... then..... kill S-... Saffron..."  
  
*BLOOSH!!* Ranma jumped back, horrified, as the dryad suddenly burst like a watermelon with a bomb inside, spilling fluids and gore all over the magic circle.  
  
"Aw, man!" "Ugh! Gross!"  
  
K nearly gagged and looked away from the unsightly display, only to glimpse something out of the corner of his eye. "Hey, what's that?"  
  
Ranma pried his eyes away from staring morbidly at the dryad's remains to see a small purple crystal hovering in the air about at the level that the dryad's chest had been.  
  
Then he saw K launch off of a tree branch and approach it. "No! K! Stop! Don't touch that thing!"  
  
Before the metadragon could get close enough to do anything of the sort, however, a loud cracking noise pierced the clearing, and the crystal shattered then and there, spilling tiny fragments of purple glass onto the ground.  
  
*Crack!* *Crack!* A split second later, the exact same noises came from the crystals generating the magic circle, and they too broke apart and fell to ground in a heap of jagged shards.  
  
Ranma stared at the scene around him, and then wearily turned to K. "So, you wanna take a guess at just what the hell happened? I'm gonna say ghosts."  
  
"Ghosts?" K scoffed, "don't be ridiculous. They don't inhabit forests! Well, not while the sun is still out, at least." He jabbed his beak at the large crystal pylons. "I recognize what those things are, at least. When mana crystals are arranged as pylons surrounding a single point that channels or manipulates mana, they act as a powerful amplifier for magic energy. Basically, what we just saw was a miniature Nexus," K concluded, nodding his head, "and a temporary one, apparently."  
  
"A miniature... Nexus?" Ranma said softly. He had heard the term many times before, usually from non-humans that he had talked to. It was the term given to the structure that served as a gateway to several other worlds. The structure that had led the flood of demon armies to Earth.  
  
"They're actually called crystal circles or something." K finished. "Though I have no clue what one's doing here, or what was up with that dryad a moment ago."  
  
"Well, damn," Ranma muttered. "Another dryad's dead, I still have the stupid rock, and now I have to hunt down ANOTHER all-powerful jerk. This quest sucks." He sighed and started forward, gesturing for K to follow him. "Come on. We'll get my pack, find somewhere in the forest to rest for the night, and then get this guy tomorrow."  
  
"Are you serious?" K asked incredulously. "How do you even know where to find this Saffron guy?"  
  
Ranma shrugged. "I heard some guy on that merchant caravan we ran into before the Amazon village mention a place called Phoenix mountain, and he pointed the peak out for me."  
  
K blinked. "And you're sure he's there?"  
  
"Well gee, I dunno," Ranma said sarcastically, "Phoenix soldiers, Phoenix king, Phoenix stone... I really have no idea where I'm getting this, now that you mention it."  
  
K sweatdropped. "Well, you're certainly in a sour mood all of a sudden."  
  
"Meh."  
  
_________________________________________________________________________________________  
  
The lone Phoenix guard stared out at the vast valleys created by China's mountains with an empty statue-like gaze, his eyes glazed.  
  
Normally, he was ridiculously attentive and alert for a guard posted on the side of the mountain which nobody approached from, going day after day without ever seeing anything beyond the common fowl of China making their nests on the jagged crags below. But today, his attention was distracted.  
  
Several of his close friends had been gathered the previous day to track down the thief that had slain the high dryad of the forest and stolen the Phoenix stone. Four groups had left the mountain to search. Three had returned.  
  
What kind of creature was it that could dispatch over two dozen trained Phoenix soldiers such that not a single one could escape alive? Certainly such beasts existed, but usually in the forms of great demon knights or magical champions that rode into battle with small armies at their backs.  
  
"Ouch! Look out where you're landing, K! You're dropping rocks on me!"  
  
It was possible that the thief had been a demon lord or champion in human guise, but what would be the point? Saffron wasn't known as a particularly powerful demon lord himself, and his people had largely survived the Death March because of their relative isolation, much like the Amazon tribes.  
  
"Sorry! These crags are so brittle they can barely support my weight! Why can't I just fly right up, anyway?"  
  
Why would such a powerful entity hide itself? There was the possibility that Saffron himself would assault the intruder, and if that happened then its destruction was certainly assured, but the scenario was still unlikely.  
  
"I told you! It's nearly impossible to hide climbing these cliffs as it is! If you fly up, everybody's going to see you!"  
  
The guard shot up. "WOULD YOU MIND KEEPING IT DOWN?! I CAN BARELY HEAR MYSELF THINK WITH YOU TWO YAPPING AWAY LIKE THAT!!"  
  
"S-Sorry!"  
  
"Sorry 'bout that!"  
  
Frowning deeply, the guard sat back down. Some of his dearest companions hadn't returned from that patrol, and... wait...  
  
The guard shot back up, and quickly rushed to the edge of his post to look down the mountain.  
  
"Intruders! Who goes-" just as he reached the edge of the cliff he was guarding, Ranma jumped up from the edge and somersaulted over him, grabbing the Phoenix's shoulders as he passed overhead. Shifting more force to his feet, he completed his landing and then threw the guard with his remaining momentum, slamming him into the wooden chair he had been resting on.  
  
Ranma dusted off his hands. "That should keep 'im out for a while. Let's find an entrance to this dump."  
  
"What was that noise?"  
  
"Over that way!"  
  
Ranma grimaced as the sound of armor scraping against rock merged with the sound of wings scraping against wind, and promptly grabbed K and ducked behind one of the larger rock spires.  
  
Peeking out cautiously, Ranma watched as two Phoenix guards swooped in and landed next to their unconscious companion, their eyes darting around nervously.  
  
Ranma patted K on the head. "Hey, go out there real quick and fly past them."  
  
Without argument, the metadragon leapt into the air and took flight, darting through the air toward the two bipedal avians.  
  
With his metal scales gleaming in the morning sun, one of the guards noticed him immediately, and pulled himself and his companion back. "Look out!"  
  
K flew by, and both guards prepared their weapons for pursuit, only to freeze and stare as they got a decent look at what had just buzzed them.  
  
"What is that?"  
  
"I looks like a... flying metal lizard?"  
  
Ranma extended his staff behind them. "He's a dragon, not a lizard."  
  
Before either Phoenix could fully grasp their sudden situation, Ranma slammed each end of the staff into their heads, denting the metal helmets deeply enough to sufficiently impact the skulls beneath.  
  
The pigtailed warrior snorted and flipped the staff over in his hand, eventually resting it over his shoulder. "How these morons ever survived the war without guns is beyond me."  
  
K gently flew back to land on his shoulder. "I'm afraid I can't help you there. I don't know much about Earth realm's history yet."  
  
Ranma shrugged as he hopped forward from rock to rock, making his way around the peak of the mountain. "I just hope this 'Saffron' guy is a little more clear-cut than the last one. I'm not even sure if that demon hunter's a bad guy anymore."  
  
K rolled his eyes. "As demon hunters go, even the ones with the worst intentions are usually considered 'good guys'."  
  
"Shhh!" Ranma commanded as he approached an outcropping.  
  
Closing his eyes, the young adventurer stretched out his awareness, using his newly-refined ki sensing skills.  
  
After a moment of concentration, he opened his eyes again. "Damn, I'm still not very good at using that. There are a lotta guys there, but I can't tell how many." He turned to K. "Do you think you could squeeze between some rocks or something and take a look? Stay in the shadows so no one sees you."  
  
K nodded quickly, very pleased that he was at last becoming of use (even if it was only as a scout and decoy).  
  
Ranma laid back flat against the rock face he was resting on, contemplating his tactics. He had performed infiltrations before, but never against a fortified cave dwelling. From what he had gathered, there were multiple entrances all down Mt. Phoenix, but as one got higher, and therefore the chance of entry by a non-flying enemy became more unlikely, there were lighter guard units.  
  
A scratching noise from below caught Ranma's attention, and he looked down as K came crawling back to him.  
  
"Well?"  
  
The metadragon shook his head. "No go. There are twenty of 'em. Not the standard fare, either. These guys have gold pins and everything. One of them even looks like a mage."  
  
Ranma nodded slowly. "I get it. Mr. Phoenix King must live here, at the peak. So we still have to deal with a heavy guard. Swell."  
  
K shook his head again. "There's no way. There's an alarm right there; if they see you, you'll have their whole army on your back!"  
  
Ranma nodded slowly, rubbing his chin. "Yeah... those odds would be slightly out of my favor..." K rolled his eyes. "But how else am I supposed to get in there?"  
  
*Clang!!* *Clang!!* *Clang!!* "Intruder!!"  
  
Ranma and K jerked up as the alarm bell sounded, looking around frantically for their pursuers.  
  
"Down the mountain! We're under attack!"  
  
"Take wing! Move, all of you!"  
  
"They've broken into the mountain already! Make haste!"  
  
Ranma and K watched, bewildered, as the elite guards began to fly down the side of the mountain toward whatever disturbance had sounded below.  
  
"Eighteen, nineteen, twenty!" K counted. "They're all gone! The entrance is clear!"  
  
Ranma scratched his head. "Weird... usually my luck is something like the opposite of this."  
  
"Whatever. Let's get in there, before they come back!"  
  
Ranma jumped over the edge of rocks that separated the peak balcony from the undeveloped crags of the mountain, and landed in a crouch, confirming that, indeed, the area was barren of protection.  
  
"Heh. Stupid birds." As he was about to enter before K, he felt a sudden trembling sensation in the rock below, and halted. "What was that?"  
  
"What was what?" K asked, hovering in the air behind him.  
  
Ranma frowned and watched as loose pebbles and rocks rolled down from the mountain peak, shaken loose by the slight, but obviously powerful disturbance.  
  
K noticed the rocks as well, and covered his head with his wings cautiously. "Is it an earthquake?"  
  
"I doubt it," Ranma muttered. "They said there was a disturbance below... hmmmmm..." he thought about it for a moment. "Let's hurry up and get in there."  
  
Past the entrance to the mountain were a series of gilded halls, seemingly devoid of any of the Phoenix that apparently made their home here.  
  
Ranma kept his senses open, even as he observed his surroundings. He decided that the halls definitely had a sort of "royal" air to them, with plush velvet cushions and delicate, exotic-looking candles set in golden shafts.  
  
Before long, the halls had converged on a huge pair of gilded doors with a large, elaborate flame painted across them and a shield in the middle of each. The shield had a crest on it that was a monochromatic representation of a simply drawn skull with a sword impaling it through the jaw and upward. The picture lacked any sort of detail, and looked almost as if it was simply stamped on.  
  
Ranma heard K gulp, and glanced over to him.  
  
"That's... the crest of the Council."  
  
Ranma blinked. "Ah, of course. The Council...... what Council?"  
  
*Clang!* K lightly smacked Ranma over the head with his wing. "You don't even know about the Council of demon lords?"  
  
"What? What do they need a council for? All they do is kill stuff and hoard money," Ranma asserted, ignoring the blow to his head.  
  
"Well, yeah, but sometimes they do it in teams," K reasoned. "Also, powerful people are usually careful not to piss off other powerful people. The Council gives the demon lords a forum to declare their territory and make deals. Every realm with more than one demon lord has a Council, and sometimes the different Councils even meet with each other."  
  
"Well, that's just peachy," Ranma grumbled, "'cause if there's one thing Earth needed more than a bunch of overpowered jerks trying to take over humanity, it's a cooperative team of overpowered jerks trying to take over humanity."  
  
"Hey, Earth realm had it easy, from what I heard," K insisted, "most other realms that get invaded by demons don't win their Death March."  
  
Ranma ceded that point with a reluctant nod, and then jerked his head around. Soft but rapid footfalls echoed from down the hall, announcing that someone was coming, though they weren't heavily armored.  
  
Making sure K had a good grip on his shoulder, Ranma jumped straight up, grabbing hold of the ceiling.  
  
Kiima dashed through the chambers as fast as she could, still badly hurt, and unable to fly, at that, from her earlier abuses at the hands of Ranma and then Saffron. As was typical of Saffron's hall when the alarm had been sounded, the chambers were empty, all the advisors and servants restricted to their chambers, while all the guards were either dealing with the threat below, or guarding Saffron himself in his chambers. Although Saffron kept a rather small guard for himself.  
  
Reaching the large double doors, Kiima pushed her way through, immediately closing them behind her afterward.  
  
Ranma quickly jumped back down to the floor as the heavy doors closed. 'Hmmm... it's that chick I smacked around earlier. So she's in league with this guy, eh?'  
  
gesturing for K to keep quiet, Ranma cautiously moved his ear up against the door.  
  
"My lord, as you no doubt are aware by now, Phoenix Mountain has been assaulted!"  
  
"Then don't waste my time telling me the obvious! Have those jakku returned?! Thaeramon promised that I would have no more trouble with their kind!"  
  
"No my lord. I did not see the attacker myself, but judging how the guards rushed to the assault, it is most visible."  
  
"There's only one?!"  
  
"As I was told by the commander of the guard, yes."  
  
Ranma scratched his head in thought as he heard that. One attacker was storming the place? Who would do something like that? 'Well, besides me,' he added to himself after a moment.  
  
*Crash!*  
  
Ranma zipped around as a ceramic platter shattered on the floor, and froze as a young Phoenix woman stared at him fearfully with her arms withdrawn over her chest, shaking.  
  
"Intr... Intru... Intruder!" she coughed out weakly, obviously too frightened to even scream properly.  
  
Ranma was about to stutter out something foolish, when K slapped a wing over his mouth.  
  
"Oh, don't worry, we were invited," K said casually. "The big guy here just gets nosy sometimes. You know how it is."  
  
The maid blinked in surprise at hearing the dragon speak, and then shook her head slightly. "Oh... okay. I'm sorry I startled you." She bowed and rushed off, ignoring the mess she had made.  
  
After she was out of earshot, Ranma looked at K appraisingly. "You speak all languages AND you can lie with a straight face. I'm sorry for every time I ever called you useless."  
  
K smirked. "Forgiven."  
  
_________________________________________________________________________________________  
  
"I'm sorry, Lord Saffron, but from what I was told, the enemy had burst through the lines and was headed for the supply warehouses. Though it's entirely possible it doesn't know its way around." Kiima bowed deeper to her master, wondering what manner of beast had infiltrated their sacred home this time. At least those jakku, deadly as they were, were quiet about their assaults.  
  
"Then whatever foolish being violates our ancestral territory is trapped, and will die here. As is fitting." Saffron almost looked bored for all the panic that the attack was causing, and leaned on his elbow which rested on the armrest of his chair. "Actually, bring word to the commander that he is to take this attacker alive, if possible. It may know something about the slime which now possesses my stone."  
  
*Wham!* Kiima pitched forward as the doors to Saffron's chamber suddenly burst open, and a human teenager in leather armor stalked through them and pointed angrily at the Phoenix king.  
  
"NOBODY calls Ranma Saotome slime and gets away with it!" Ranma shouted, quickly scanning the room. Six guards, plus the chick who was already beaten up and big bird himself. Too easy.  
  
The Phoenix all stared back at him expressionlessly, as if rooted in place.  
  
Ranma lowered his finger for a moment, looking as if he suddenly remembered something. "Well, except for that one guy who called me slime and then ran away. He got away with it." He then pointed at Saffron again. "But MOST people who call me slime don't get away with it!"  
  
The Phoenix kept staring.  
  
"Well, actually," Ranma made another revision as he thought it over, "that one guy who called me slime and ran away... he was the only guy who's ever called me slime before." He again pointed to Saffron. "But after today, only HALF the people who have called me slime will have gotten away with it!"  
  
Saffron sweatdropped. "Are you done?"  
  
"Yeah, I think we'd all like to move forward now," K added, looking bored.  
  
Saffron cleared his throat, and then glared at the pigtailed adventurer who had intruded upon his halls.  
  
"Ranma Saotome... so you would be the one who stole my Phoenix stone?"  
  
"'Stole'? Whatever!" Ranma scoffed.  
  
"Regardless, I feel obligated to allow you the opportunity to return the stone yourself. Shall you elect to do so, I promise that your death will be as quick and painless as possible."  
  
"Oh, well, gee, you know, that's such a good offer, I'll have to think about it," Ranma deadpanned, crossing his arms over his chest, "how about instead, you recall all your goonies, and I won't break that nice-looking throne over your head. How's that sound?"  
  
Saffron's left eye twitched, and he glanced at the leader of his personal guard. "Kill him. Make it slow."  
  
"Sir!" The Phoenix responded, drawing a long, double-handed sword from the large sheath set between his wings. The other five guards did the same, and the heavily armored soldiers began stalking forward.  
  
Sitting atop Ranma's head, K snorted. "I'd give these guys ten, maybe fifteen seconds."  
  
Ranma rolled his eyes. "Not even." Then he addressed the Phoenix assembled in front of him. "You know what's wrong with you ancient Chinese guys?"  
  
Without waiting for a response, Ranma pulled his .50 caliber Nighthawk from where it was hidden under his belt.  
  
*Blam!!* *Blam!!* *Blam!!* *Blam!!* *Blam!!* *Blam!!*  
  
Ranma flipped the gun over in his hand as smoke wafted from the barrel, and grinned as the six guards fell to the floor, nursing bloody leg wounds. "You need to modernize."  
  
*Fwsh* Drawing his staff in one hand as he put his pistol away with the other, he approached the fallen soldiers almost sorrowfully as they tried to push aside the pain of their wounds and rise to the attack.  
  
*Thwack!* *Wham!* *Thunk!*  
  
Saffron watched with mild amusement as his finest soldiers were batted around like helpless animals, tossed to all the corner of the great hall with punishing swings of Ranma's mithrill staff.  
  
But the amusement was not enough to quell the hunger he felt deep inside him. The human had it. The stone was with him. Saffron could feel it pulsing with power, power that was rightfully his!  
  
"ENOUGH!!!" Saffron stood up fully from his throne, and Kiima scurried out of the way as the Phoenix king's aura exploded around him.  
  
Ranma jumped back, sparing the last guard on the ground a painful lump as his own aura lit around him. Unlike Saffron's aura, which burned like a bonfire, Ranma's enveloped him tightly, embracing his body and strengthening it.  
  
With a slight gesture, K evacuated the battle zone, flying up toward on of the balconies above.  
  
Saffron stalked forward slowly, flexing his talons. As he reached the guard on the floor that Ranma had been about to disable, he raised one of his arms into the air, and then brought it down, not quite touching his bodyguard.  
  
*SHRAK!!* Blades of fire ripped into the hapless soldier, and the Phoenix didn't even have time to scream before the cauterized remains of his body fell to the floor, fused with charred strips of his own armor.  
  
Ranma's eyes widened. "Uh... wasn't he on your side?"  
  
Saffron snarled. "I have no need for weaklings!"  
  
Ranma stared for a moment, then nodded in understanding. "Oh, I get it. You're one of those types of kings, huh?"  
  
"HRAAAAUGH!!!" Saffron charged forward with incredible speed, intent on cleaving Ranma in the same manner he did his own guard.  
  
*Thock* To the demi-god's utter surprise, Ranma caught his attack on the way down with his right hand, the gauntlet protecting it seeming unaffected by the tremendous heat Saffron commanded.  
  
Ranma batted away Saffron's talons, and then used both hands to quickly thrust his staff into the Phoenix king's stomach, stunning him long enough for Ranma to finish with a powerful staff strike to the side of his head.  
  
Backing off slightly, Ranma flexed his gauntleted hand appraisingly. "You know, I didn't know if that would work or not. I'm still not sure what this thing's made out of."  
  
"I'll be sure to look into it," Saffron said as he stood up straight, his aura building, "after I strip it from your ashen CORPSE!!"  
  
Then he threw his arms forward, and the world turned white.  
  
*BWOOOOOOM!!!* A massive line of fiery explosions blasted across the royal hall, instantly incinerating two guards that happened to be in its way, and completely blinding most of the others that were present.  
  
After a few seconds the light receded, and the floor beneath the flames fell through completely to the level beneath, the paved tile and hardened rock turned molten under Saffron's power.  
  
Saffron started to smile, but then realized that he could still sense the stone, and it wasn't in front of him so much as it was...  
  
He jerked his head up to see Ranma waving at him with his left hand and aiming his pistol with his right hand, while his legs were firmly clamped around the golden chandelier that hung over the royal hall.  
  
*Blam!!*  
  
Ranma snorted as Saffron's jerked backward, the hole in his forehead evident. "Some demon lord. No magical force field, no bullet-proof skin, no nothing."  
  
Saffron merely glared at him, and the bullet wound in his forehead slowly shrank and then sealed itself.  
  
Ranma blinked. "Oh... you can do that. This is going to be harder than I thought."  
  
Saffron sneered and raised a hand toward his foe, small spheres of fire lighting up around him.  
  
All at once the spheres blasted forward, and Ranma jumped down from his perch to dodge as small explosions blasted the ceiling.  
  
The moment he touched the floor he had to dodge Saffron's talons as the mighty king make a swipe at his head and then a thrust for his chest.  
  
After sidestepping the thrust, Ranma kicked Saffron in the back, only to have the Phoenix king throw a fireball that slammed into Ranma and knocked him back several meters, where he landed roughly on his back.  
  
"You're no match for me. Give yourself to the flames."  
  
"Hmph." Ranma got up easily and dusted himself off. "You're lucky your element is fire, or you'd be in soooo much trouble about now."  
  
Saffron barked a short laugh and launched forward, slashing his talons with lightning speed. Ranma deflected the first two attacks with his staff, but Saffron held the third back for a bit longer, and struck with such power that the mithril pole flew off to the side, out of Ranma's grasp.  
  
The next thrust Ranma ducked under, and ignored the sound of crumbling stone as Saffron's talons pierced the chamber walls. He kicked upward and then spun into a sweep, knocking his enemy down while giving himself time to make a dash for his weapon.  
  
"GYAH!!" Saffron made a clawing gesture toward the staff, and a blade of fire cut a flaming gouge in the floor between the weapon and its owner, stopping Ranma short. Another gesture, and Ranma was backflipping away as more fire blasted the walls and floor around him.  
  
Ranma landed in a crouch, keeping a careful eye on his seemingly invincible opponent. It occurred to him that the way to defeat an enemy with an affinity for heat would be to use an attack that used cold, but he didn't know any attack like that, and given that the Hyoken school used a flame aura to execute its maneuvers, it just wasn't possible for him to improvise a fire-killing move on the spot. But otherwise, Saffron seemed invulnerable to physical attacks. Or at least, blunt impacts and small piercing wounds.  
  
The Phoenix king saw his enemy hesitate, and got back to his feet, flame building in one hand.  
  
"PERISH!!!" A solid beam of white-hot light blasted into Ranma, slamming him back into one of the walls of the chamber, and completely engulfing his form in a cocoon of white fire.  
  
"RANMA!!" K yelled in panic, watching as the floors and walls closest to his companion began to melt from the intense heat.  
  
"Ha! The pitiful mortal thought he could defy the gods and live! A fitting death!" Kiima cheered on her master as he flexed his claws, reveling in the glory of victory.  
  
Saffron grinned as he turned toward the metal-clad annoyance perched on his balcony. "And you're next, little one. You'll cook quite well in that metal wrapping of yours."  
  
"You should really... make sure... that I'm finished first!"  
  
Saffron whirled back around, and gazed in disbelief as a badly charred Ranma stood up in the corona of white fire, a halo of red surrounding him.  
  
Ranma grimaced and stepped away from the molten area behind him, wiping his forehead. If the Hyoken training and aura hadn't given him such a high resistance to heat himself, he was certain that Saffron's blast would've taken him out for good. 'At least my right hand feels fine. I'm beginning to think this stupid glove's just plain invincible.'  
  
"You live?!" Saffron asked, as if the figure standing before him might be an illusion or spirit.  
  
Ranma frowned. "Yeah, I live. And I'm sick of carrying around this stupid rock!" Ranma took the Phoenix stone out of his pocket, observing how Saffron's eyes gleamed when he saw it. "You want it? GO FETCH!!"  
  
Ranma reared back his arm, then threw the magical gemstone at an angle, bouncing it on the floor past the Phoenix king and into the hole in the floor he had made with one of his earlier attacks.  
  
Saffron moved to go after it, and then jerked to a stop. This was obviously a distraction! Turning around, he thrust a hand toward where Ranma's staff lay.  
  
*SHRAK!!* Blades of fire tore into the floor once again, knocking the well-protected staff into the air harmlessly. Ranma was nowhere near it.  
  
*Shrick* Saffron gaped as the blade of his guard's greatsword poked out of his chest, and gasped helplessly as he was spun around to face Ranma.  
  
"Payback time, sparky." Ranma grabbing his shoulder with his left hand and then started pounding the Phoenix king with his right, his arm jackhammering into Saffron's face and chest.  
  
*Thock!* *Thock!* *Thock!* *Thock!* *Thock!* *Thock!* *Thock!*  
  
Ranma then kicked Saffron away, and drew his Nighthawk before his opponent had even hit the floor. *Blam!!* *Blam!!* *Blam!!* *Blam!!* *Blam!!*  
  
He let the dead clip fall out of the loading chamber, and then stuck his pistol back in his belt as his oppoent fell backward onto the floor, propped up by the oversized sword he was impaled on.  
  
Ranma grinned. "Let's see ya get up from that."  
  
Saffron's body twitched, and then his hands fell flat on the floor, pushing his body up.  
  
Ranma blinked. "Uh... hey... I was just kidding... you can die now."  
  
"Saffron will never die!" Kiima yelled from the sidelines, "his power is eternal! He is-"  
  
"Oh, will you SHUT UP?!?!" K yelled irritably, above her. "Geez, get a life you stupid avian!"  
  
Ignoring the exchange behind him, Saffron stood up fully, the bullet and impact wounds on his face already healed. Raising one hand, he formed it into a fist, and then punched himself in the chest over the tip of the greatsword, causing it to burst out the other end of him.  
  
"So, am I like, the only one that wouldn't feel up to fighting if a sword was sticking out of both sides of me?" Ranma wondered aloud.  
  
Saffron chuckled slightly as he stalked forward. "You are to be commended for your prowess, human, even if your wisdom is lacking. It has been a great treat to fight someone who would have had the upper hand in a 'fair' battle. Unfortunately for you, mortality is fleeting. And now so has yours." Saffron raised his talons to the attack.  
  
*RRRRRRUMBLE!*  
  
Everyone staggered as the chamber shook from some nearby vibration, and Saffron looked about wildly.  
  
"What? The attacker? But... wasn't that you?"  
  
Ranma blinked. "Uh... no. You mean you forgot about the attack?"  
  
*KABOOM!!!* A section of the floor from behind Saffron's throne burst apart in an explosion of black energy, and tendrils of dark lightning crackled around the hole as bits of rock and tile fell around the room.  
  
*Clang!* *Wham!* *K-shing!* *Shwit!* *SLAM!!*  
  
Ranma blinked as the sounds of battle came from the hole. "What's going on down there?"  
  
*K-shang!* *Thwack!* *BLAM!!*  
  
The chamber shook slightly, and the noise from below paused.  
  
Then a figure jumped out of the hole in the floor, landing in a crouch on the chamber floor.  
  
"What the-?! YOU AGAIN?!" Ranma shouted.  
  
"The hell? You following me?" Rayden asked, getting up and resting his broadsword over his shoulder.  
  
Up on the balcony, K groaned. The demon hunter was back, and despite him looking surprisingly better than he had the previous day, he still had a number of bloodstains and cuts about him.  
  
Of course, by all accounts, he HAD just fought all the way up from the lowest level up to the peak of Mount Phoenix, and his trench coat had several crossbow bolts and arrows sticking out of it, so it was rather likely that his current wounds were recent, even if K couldn't fathom that the man had recovered from an impalement and near-dismemberment in a single day.  
  
"And who are you?" Saffron muttered tiredly, deciding that he really had to put more effort into training his guards.  
  
Rayden turned his attention away from the teenage samurai, and jabbed the thumb of his free hand at himself. "I'm-whoa, wait, hold on."  
  
*Shyick!* Rayden turned and performed a horizontal slash right as a Phoenix soldier flew up out of the hole in the floor, and a thin spray of blood lashed out as the Phoenix continued flying upward. Upon contact with the ceiling the soldier immediately split at the torso, and blood and body fell to the grasp of gravity and fell back into the hole.  
  
Rayden's left hand pulsed with dark energy, and a black aura surrounded it, crackling with electric arcs of the same color. With a gesture, he launched an energy bolt into the recesses of the hole, and a few short shouts were heard before a loud detonation, and a proceeding silence.  
  
Rayden turned back around casually, his left hand trailing smoke. "Sorry 'bout that. Well, not really." He grinned and flipped his sword back up so that it rested on his shoulder.  
  
The others in the room watched in morbid fascination as the blood on the broadsword's edge quickly disappeared, as if it was evaporating... or perhaps being consumed by the sword itself.  
  
"Well, that explains a few things," Ranma mumbled.  
  
Rayden looked about the room, then nodded at Saffron. "You there. You're Saffron, right? I've heard some things about you."  
  
Saffron raised an eyebrow, and flexed his talons experimentally. "Really now?"  
  
The dark paladin nodded, and pointed at his prey. "Yeah. You've asserted your rule over the surrounding lands and driven out anyone who might pose a physical or economic threat to your monarchy. You've forbidden technology trading so that the people can't get weapons to fight off your soldiers, and you tax them harshly without providing anything but enforcement for your own self-serving laws."  
  
Saffron smirked. "All true. And I suppose you're going to strike me down in a heroic victory for justice and good, aren't you?"  
  
"Yeah, somethin' like that," Rayden shrugged, bumping Darkrune off his shoulder and letting the ancient blade fall to the floor. *Thud* It made a heavy impact as the point of the sword dug into the tile of the chamber, and Rayden hunched over slightly as he grabbed the handle with both hands. "Just tryin' to work off some bad karma. And maybe root through your treasury for some booze money."  
  
Ranma sighed. "And just as I was starting to think this guy was alright..."  
  
"Hmph!" Saffron snorted. "The mortals of today's generation are too insolent! To have to dispose of two of you in one day? It's below me to deal with worms like you!"  
  
Rayden smirked. "Mortals, immortals... it all tastes the same to Darkrune's edge, chicken boy."  
  
Saffron rolled his eyes. "At least this other pest had the courtesy to assault me with style. Burn for your trouble, insect."  
  
His claw flared with the same light from when he had blasted Ranma, and once again the pure white beam blasted across the chambers, engulfing Rayden in a molten pillar of light.  
  
Ranma sweatdropped as Saffron turned back toward him. "Aren't you going to make sure he's dead?"  
  
"He's dead," Saffron asserted, his talons glowing once again.  
  
"Are you sure? You made the same mistake with me."  
  
"I'm sure." Saffron took a step forward, and the fire around his arm glowed even brighter.  
  
"Seriously, I made the same mistake before. That guy's really tough."  
  
"Stop stalling," Saffron said, raising his talons in the air.  
  
"......... I don't think he's dead."  
  
*Shoom!* Saffron halted as a wave of heat rushed over him, and he caught a glimpse of dark energy out of the corner of his eye.  
  
"Nope. He's alive. Toldja."  
  
"Venom strike!" Darkrune glowed with a blue-black haze as it cut forward in a simple vertical chop, cleaving the Phoenix king through the head and down through one leg. Flowing after the physical blade was a trail of black, pulsating energy that made its way through Saffron's wound and attached itself to the damaged flesh, feeding on the demi-god's life force.  
  
Rayden drew the sword out, and then held it straight up in front of him, idly dusting the off the burned sections of his trench coat with one hand. Saffron's blood followed the blade's movements, flowing from the wound to the sword's edge like iron in the presence of a magnet.  
  
The blue-black energy returned, and the purple gemstone set in the broadsword's pommel glowed suddenly.  
  
"Huh. I was wrong. He seems to like this guy's blood a little more than usual." Rayden said, obviously perplexed by the morbid occurrence.  
  
"LORD SAFFRON!!!" Kiima screamed, falling to her knees as Saffron's body did the same. After a moment, the corpse fell forward completely, the festering split falling open.  
  
She glared hatefully at the swordsman. "You have not won! Saffron is invincible! He will be reborn soon!"  
  
Rayden snorted. "Yeah. Right. I doubt it."  
  
*Gshzaaak!* Arcs of black lightning curled around Saffron's corpse, and the Phoenix king began to disintegrate, his flesh burning to ash, and his blood continuing its constant flow to Darkrune's edge.  
  
"NOOOOO!!" Kiima yelled, tears starting to stream down her face. It was impossible! Saffron's life could not be extinguished! He was the Phoenix!  
  
The dark paladin sheathed his great blade, and placed his right hand in front of his nose, holding the palm flat while pointing upward. "Gushay narai gackoo noh torgra. The flames of Kharak purge the soul of its physical prison, and the dead find peace in eternity as the dust of the living fade." His prayer complete, Rayden began to dust off his hands. "Well, time to loot the place!"  
  
"You... you..." Rayden halted, and Kiima took a step back as Ranma suddenly advanced on the demon hunter, his left eye twitching.  
  
"Hey, whoa. Back off now kid. We're cool right now, and I don't wanna-URK!!" Rayden was unsuccessful in warding off the teenage adventurer, and found himself hunched over as Ranma grabbed him by the collar and yanked him down to stare him in the eyes.  
  
"ONE. HIT." Ranma said, gritting his teeth.  
  
Rayden blinked. "What?"  
  
"ONE HIT!!" Ranma yelled, causing the swordsman to wince. "I worked my ass off punching, kicking, striking, shooting, and stabbing that overgrown canary, and you come up behind him and kill the jerk with a single blow!!" He shook Rayden violently back and forth for a moment, then yanked him up close again. "Do you understand me?!"  
  
"N-No, not really," Rayden muttered dizzily, "I mean, what do you want me to do about it?"  
  
"Teach me to do that," Ranma said, absolutely serious.  
  
*Thud!* From his perch on the balcony, K performed a spectacular, though painful, seven-meter facefault.  
  
*BOOM!!!*  
  
The four conscious occupants of the room all blinked as a loud noise came from below, reaching the royal chambers primarily through the two holes that had been ripped into the floor.  
  
*Shrak!*  
  
"AIIIIEE!!!"  
  
"Run! Run for the exits!!"  
  
"It's no use! They're-Glaugh!" *Schick!*  
  
*Bwack!*  
  
"Look out!"  
  
Ranma and Rayden looked at each other.  
  
"Friends of yours?" Ranma questioned.  
  
Rayden shook his head. "Nope. Are you sure it isn't your dryad friends?"  
  
"Assuming you didn't kill them all, maybe," Ranma muttered, "though I doubt they could cause that kind of disturbance."  
  
*Bam!*  
  
The room's occupants turned as the doors to the chamber burst open, and an elderly Phoenix man rushed in, panting.  
  
"Alert Lord Saffron! The mountain is under attack!"  
  
Kiima blinked, then scowled. "Of course it's under attack! Have you been asleep for the last twenty minutes?!"  
  
He shook his head. "No, you don't understand! The jakku have returned! Not just a few, but a whole assault force! With golems and..." for the first time since arriving, the old avian took a good look around the room. "Say... what happened here? Where is Lord Saffron?"  
  
Kiima lowered her head in shame. Ranma, Rayden, and K jabbed their thumbs and beaks at the bleached, winged skeleton that now laid next to the burning throne, split in twain and laying in a pile of ash.  
  
The old man took a step back, horror seizing him. "It... it cannot be! He has abandoned us in our greatest hour of need!"  
  
"Well, it wasn't totally his fault," Rayden reasoned. Ranma rolled his eyes.  
  
"No! We're doomed! Doomed! Doo-GURK!!" The elder's speech was cut short as a large, heavy claw burst through his chest, spraying blood and gore on the floor in front of him. As the Phoenix's corpse fell to the floor, the chain went taught, and each person in the room could see that the end of the chain seemed to disappear in midair somewhere near the doorway.  
  
"Hamakku!" Ranma shouted, finally recovering his staff from its position behind the decimated throne. "Look out for its crossbow!"  
  
"You! You must fight!" Kiima shouted at the two men desperately. "Our lord cannot protect us because of you! You must save us!"  
  
"Alright! Alright!" Rayden said irritably, cracking his knuckles as the stench of barely preserved flesh entered the chamber. "After that pathetic warmup your little winged friends gave me, a bunch of zombies should be no trouble at... huh?" Rayden blinked as glowing symbols appeared in a ring off in a corner of the chamber. "Is that a transport circle?"  
  
K blinked, and then quickly flew to Ranma and landed on his head. "I th-think it is!"  
  
Rayden nodded, and his fists crackled with black lightning, preparing to unleash their dark power.  
  
To everyone's surprise, however, the circle didn't transport something into the chambers, but instead expanded suddenly in radius, moving beyond Rayden, Ranma, and Kiima's positions to cover them in its effect range.  
  
"Well, damn." It wasn't clear at that particular moment who said it, though its quite likely it came from more than one mouth.  
  
*Shooo!*  
  
_________________________________________________________________________________________  
  
Up on the very top of Mount Phoenix, Doppler let the light between his upper hands die, and smiled. "So, he is alive after all. What a fantastic creature he is." The demon lord shook his head at the thought that he had nearly killed such a fascinating specimen in a moment when caution had beat out curiosity. Surely it was a shameful mistake for a great scientist!  
  
Tio looked over the swarms of undead and constructs that flooded into the Phoenix stronghold, courtesy of Genex Karl's tireless workshops. "I'm sure the advance wave has reached the royal chambers by now. Even if they're powerful enough to destroy the demi-god, as you said they have, I wouldn't count on them still having the strength to fight such an army."  
  
"They're out," Doppler said simply. "What a stroke of luck that I remembered that magic circle I drew to teleport in Karl's golem puppet. From here I was even able to teleport different sections of the circle to different areas. Shikodan should turn up somewhere further north, while that interesting human will end up to the east."  
  
"And the Phoenixes?" Tio asked, only mildly curious in Doppler's latest long-range experiment.  
  
"Eh." Doppler shrugged. "The girl ended up somewhere... else. I wasn't really paying too much attention to her. The others were outside the circle still." He then snapped his fingers on his top-right hand. "Oh, and speaking of which, since we no longer have to worry about how many we take, instruct the golems to capture any of the avians that the undead miss or leave for dead. They may prove somewhat useful later."  
  
"Right away, my lord," Tio grasped a control stone in his hand and concentrated, organizing his thoughts into simple, functional commands for the golems. Ordinarily the constructs didn't comprehend much more than "smash this" and "don't smash this", but Karl's golems were of quality stock, and could carry out more sophisticated tasks.  
  
"I really was surprised that the human did so well. I find myself wondering if he would have found some way to win, had Rayden not interfered. He's obviously an alpha, in any case." He nodded to himself at the declaration, rubbing his chin with his top-left hand. "This has been a positively wonderful trip! I've found a new alpha to observe, my old pet project, I'll have a new stronghold once I wash the blood from the walls, and I even completed the task I originally came here for!"  
  
The veirheelu chuckled to himself. "Saffron, you arrogant fool. Never thinking, never compromising or manipulating. It's no wonder your kind perished from the realms so long ago."  
  
Slowly, he opened his two lower hands, which had been clasped together. The Phoenix stone laid in his palms, glowing brightly with its supernatural light.  
  
"All you ever sought was power. But your power... is now mine."  
  
*****************************************************************************************  
  
End Chapter 4 


	5. How to be a Ninja in 38 Easy Steps

The Origins of the Blood Angel Tribe:  
  
[The blood angel is a very unique species, unlike every other creature I've ever come across.]  
  
[Technically though, it is not even a species unto itself. The origins of the blood angels, and in many cases even their existence, is shamefully guarded by the angel tribes on Talbeern. However, I didn't find it particularly difficult to thwart them, and besides which, it would seem that the legend has already somehow leaked out into the many libraries telling of old legends. It's also, of course, heavily and accurately archived in every library devoted to the Third Brotherhood, which is the warrior cult, among the Eight Dark Brotherhoods, that worships the ancient of destruction, Kharak. Perhaps the angels deemed it safe to remain there because few outside the Eight Brotherhoods lend any credence to their legends and prophecies. Or, more likely, they had no means with which to remove it. It's not considered wise, diplomatically (or medically) speaking, to enter into conflict with the Brotherhoods.]  
  
[After confirming the story within the angels' archives, I am now more eager than ever to begin my experimentation upon the blood angels. I had heard several rumors that the tribe was pure angel in origin, but the manner in which they were cursed may prove invaluable to my studies.]  
  
[Kairis was the birth realm of the tribe, as well as a plane that was well known for being tormented by Kharak himself, who is recorded as the last living ancient to survive whatever great purge wiped them out. Kharak, despite being an ancient born to ravage and kill, was a being of nature; to destroy on such scale that it would upset the critical balance between life and death (in short, to kill EVERYTHING) was foolish, for without life to create life, death ceases to exist, and its reverence is lost among the ashes of those already within its cold embrace. Thus, even though he survived for eons on Kairis, the land wasn't the desolate, battle-scarred wasteland it was imagined to be. Several civilizations thrived around the dark mountain range that Kharak inhabited, and frequently weathered the ancient's murderous excursions, fleeing until the great destroyer had fed, and then rebuilding what had been destroyed.]  
  
[The name of the angel tribe that eventually assaulted Kharak is, unfortunately, lost to the sands of time; I was totally unable to come upon even a guess as to which it was (though if I know the angels, they were merely being extra-careful to hide that secret). Their means to DEFEAT a being that was, in all practicality, a dark god, is similarly lost, but this is heavily speculated on, and far more openly than anything else having to do with this particular legend.]  
  
[The important thing is, that angel tribe descended upon Kharak's lair, and slew the last of the ancients with surprising efficiency; only a few hundred died, it is speculated.]  
  
[Of course, killing that which is greater than one's capacity to understand can have... unexpected consequences.]  
  
[Ancients do not truly die. They merely take on different forms of consciousness, or are banished from certain planes of existence. Thus, even as his heart solidified with power, Kharak reached out with the shadows, and consumed the angels that had defeated him in that shadow.]  
  
[They were tainted. Corrupted. Their bodies grew large and powerful, and were charged with dark magics; magics that tainted their souls, ravaged their auras, and burned their wings to the bone, turning the feathered wings of their heritage into sharp, blackened bone, incapable of flight. Their eyes glowed a deathly crimson, they became incapable of wielding light magic, and their bodies pulsed with the shadows, like demons.]  
  
[This alone was enough for the angel race, as a whole, to turn their backs on the tainted tribe. But it did not end there.]  
  
[Some tried to help them. To cure the affliction. Priests spent months at prayer, spell, and research in their attempts to purge the formerly pure souls of Kharak's venomous curse. They were, after all, heroes and saviors, burdened with a horrible disease. However, it soon became apparent that the transformation went deeper than any had imagined.]  
  
[The term "blood angel" gained use when it was discovered that the tainted ones could gain power, not by devotion to a patron god or meditation, but through the absorption of life. This absorption was very specific in nature, and mimicked that of the ancient Kharak perfectly: the blood angels absorbed the blood of the slain. Once dead, a soulless husk could be drained of the blood it had possessed before expiring, collecting upon the wings of the blood angel, and the blood angel would gain some fraction of that power. This ability was very specifically related to the creature's aura and magic; as far as physical replenishment goes, the blood angel eats food like any other living creature. Food, however, was incapable of fueling their magical energies.]  
  
[This presented a very grave problem, because without using such a "horrid" method of gaining power, the shadow magic that the blood angels now possessed would wane, burning away with every passing day, and they would become weaker.]  
  
[This wasn't a notable difficulty at first; many of the blood angels swore to relinquish combat forever, disgusted with what they had become, not wanting to use the dark power they now possessed, and unable to even fathom absorbing a slain creature's blood to replenish such energies. That changed with the discovery of the Rioting.]  
  
[Rioting is a simple and effectively expressive term given to the berserk state of a power-drained blood angel. After a length of time in which they have not consumed blood, their bodies become unable to sustain the dark energy that they are, whether they like it or not, dependant upon in order to live. At that point, certain portions of their brain shut down, and they become instinct-driven, bloodthirsty butchers, killing anything and everything that will yield fresh blood.]  
  
[I have determined through my own studies that, unfortunately for those assigned to watch over and help the blood angels, a Rioter is not, as one may theorize, relatively weak. The blood angel's body expends all energy it has left such that it may spill enough blood to maintain itself, and were, under the influence of the Riot, the most fiercely ruthless, hideously brutal creatures that existed on Kairis until their exile. Thus, those that had promised to assist the tainted angels quickly realized that they would likely be slaughtered for their kindness, and most chose to abandon the project, or at least continue study far away from the actual subjects.]  
  
[As for the blood angels themselves, they realized what was happening to them; that they would either embrace what they had become, or they would destroy all others around them. Being angels still, they possessed much pride and inner strength, and could not accept either outcome. So, as a community, they decided to return to the lands that cursed them, and attempt to puzzle out a cure amongst the barren mountain range, where no innocents could be hurt. It was not to be.]  
  
[I see now that I used the word "exile" to describe what happened to the blood angels such that there are no more present in the realm of Kairis. A more accurate term would be "retreat". As soon as the remaining angel tribes heard about the Rioting, all argument for the heroic sacrifice of the blood angels ceased, and the angels moved for genocide of the corrupted, "for the sake of their fallen souls". Thousands upon thousands of winged soldiers rained missiles down upon the grounded blood angels, who fled in panic. A great many were horrified and furious about being attacked by those they had sacrificed for when they had done nothing wrong; but still, angel pride and nobility won out, and the tainted angels refused to fight their former brethren, instead retreating to a nexus and flooding into another realm. The angel tribes were hard-pressed to find reason to follow, as inter-realm invasions were notoriously difficult, and as the blood angels were hardly a threat any longer.]  
  
[Eventually that concept of angelic pride and nobility faded from the shadow-clouded minds of the blood angel tribe, and they became a society based on warfare, moving from realm to realm, kingdom to kingdom, fighting, feeding, and breeding. It mattered not whether they won or lost a war, so long as there was death to feed the survivors' power. They fed, and moved on. Over time they forgot who they were, and thought of themselves as the demons they are constantly mistaken for.]  
  
[They have names, too, that describe their race. And to their great disturbance, some point far too directly to their origins, even if the common minstrel has no idea what they mean; Fallen Ones. Blackwing. The Flightless. The Exiled. Kharak's Children...]  
  
[The last one, in particular, intrigues me. In part, because I can't figure out what ever became of Kharak. When ancients die, they do not just lose consciousness permanently and then rot away; the spirits of ancients always remain, and their bodies have a habit of becoming objects of legendary power. I would very much enjoy having Kharak's heartstone for my studies. Very much indeed...]  
  
- Entry #3572 of Doppler Thaeramon's personal scientific journal  
  
Nexus II  
  
by Black Dragon  
  
http://www.angelfire.com/anime5/fanficlair  
  
Pie!  
  
" " human languages, {" "} demonic languages or languages different than the one in common use in a given scene, [ ] writing, ( ) smart-ass author comments, * * sounds.  
  
If I don't happen to mention which language in particular is being spoken, then it's not important anyway.  
  
Chapter 5  
  
How to be a Ninja in 38 Easy Steps  
  
***********************************************************************************  
  
"Goddamn it. After all that mess, not only did I lose the stupid rock, but I got flung way out here. Where the hell am I, anyway?" Ranma grimaced as he continued pushing his way through the thick jungle, desperately struggling through seemingly solid walls of vines and trees.  
  
Luckily, he had evaluated that he was relatively safe. Wherever he had been teleported to, the jungle was SO thick that no monster of respectable danger could have possibly made their home within it. Of course, Ranma still had to fend off the swarms of native-Earth insects, but at least he didn't have to worry about being fried by lightning bolts.  
  
K was having a better time, as he was much smaller, and as the numerous bugs weren't capable of even irritating his steel-hard armor scales. "I didn't see any foliage like this when I was in China. I'd have to guess we're pretty far away from Phoenix Mountain, though."  
  
Ranma rolled his eyes, then blinked as he realized that there was a path ahead. With the jungle canopy closing so tightly that even breathing was a chore, there wasn't much light, and Ranma didn't notice that several trees had been broken until he had almost fallen over forward, not having another tightly interweaving wall of jungle growth to hack through after the last one.  
  
"Hey... most of these trees have all been plowed over..." Blinking, Ranma stepped forward onto the makeshift path, and followed along as the foliage became more sparse, eventually letting in enough light so that he could make out his surroundings in good detail.  
  
"Huh... these trees were mostly ripped apart... not run over, like by tanks." Ranma frowned, then moved forward some more, looking to either side of him. Sure enough, he could see that the paths of shredded growth seemed to stretch alongside him for quite some ways. He wasn't able to tell much more, because despite the apparently high level of destruction that befell this section of jungle, it had happened long ago; new shrubs of respectable height had already grown in place of the fallen rubbish.  
  
"Hey, what's that?" K asked suddenly, flying up into one of the taller, unharmed trees. "Whoa! What happened here?!"  
  
Ranma frowned, and then rushed forward, quickly clearing the last obscuring walls of greenery.  
  
What K was referring to was VERY apparent. The landscape Ranma saw before him was, to put it euphemistically, a desolate wasteland of blackened craters, jagged shrapnel, and charred bone, with the smell of death hanging in the air like a permanent fog bank.  
  
"What happened here?" K asked nervously, flying up to land on Ranma's shoulder. From a dragon's-eye view, the entire area before them, stretching for miles and miles, was just an ocean of craters. Everywhere. Craters on top of craters. Large craters filled with little craters. Not a single square inch seemed to have been spared a high-impact explosive.  
  
That wasn't the most disturbing part about it, though. Huge, partially broken wyrm skeletons stretched along the pockmarked wasteland, chunks of their armor plates scattered around the jagged, splintered bone formations. The wyrms, of course, didn't present any kind of danger in their present form, but the deceased juggernauts made foreboding guardians, especially as it seemed that a much larger force had battled here.  
  
After K had finished staring uneasily at the landscape, he looked up, and realized with surprise that Ranma was shaking his head sadly. "Hey, what's up?"  
  
Ranma sighed. "This... this is Korea."  
  
K blinked. "You can tell?"  
  
Ranma nodded. "Uh huh. This is the demilitarized zone, a barrier between North and South Korea. You know, when they still had governments."  
  
K frowned. "So... what happened?"  
  
The pigtailed wanderer walked forward and then sat down heavily on the lip of a crater, looking somber.  
  
"Well... when most of the demons left Japan and headed for the mainland, North Korea was first. They responded by using their only effective weapon: atomic warheads. On their OWN SOIL. Close enough that their own settlements were caught in the impact blast. But it worked, kind of."  
  
"Kind of?"  
  
He nodded. "A vast majority of one of the demon armies was annihilated. They just never saw it coming. One minute there was a big hunk of metal in the sky, the next minute, BOOM, almost everyone was dead. Almost everyone."  
  
Ranma snorted. "Besides unleashing huge radioactive clouds that spread all over Korea, it turns out that there were some creatures that happen to be immune, or resistant enough, to the effects of heat and radiation released by an atomic bomb. I only know four of 'em: jugas, dragonkin, psilors, and most devils. There weren't many of those, but there were enough to wreak havoc and disable North Korea's nuclear capabilities before the second army, I think it was the Three Legions, broke through, and crushed everyone who was left."  
  
The he gestured out into the broken landscape. "Nobody in the rest of the world really cared much about North Korea, because the guy running the show was a maniac himself, and North Korea was obviously a really poor place to hold a defensive line. So troops from all over the world lined up on South Korea's border."  
  
K held silent for a moment, then tentatively asked, "What happened?"  
  
Ranma pursed his lips. "I talked to a guy that had made it from there when I was in Israel. He told me all about it. First across the border came the remnants of that first army that had survived the nuke."  
  
K winced.  
  
Ranma, to the metadragon's surprise, smirked. "They were totally annihilated. The demons, I mean. Many of the wyrms traveled underground, and disturbed the minefields enough so that the entire ground began to blow apart above them. They surfaced, and were brought down. It didn't even matter that we hadn't invented mithril yet; there were so many guns, rockets, and artillery all pounding this one stretch of land that everything that moved was ripped apart. The guy told me that the first few small waves of demons inflicted only eight casualties, total. After that, it was silent for about two weeks."  
  
K stared critically at the blasted landscape, and gave a sideways glance to a nearby wyrm skeleton.  
  
"Then came the zombies. The general leading the army of the Three Legions was supposedly a pretty slick guy; he finished killing off everyone in North Korea who hadn't managed to escape already, and then raised them as zombies. ALL of them. They say that it took days of non-stop enchanting and casting with every necromancer in the whole army, and probably from a few others, but they raised every North Korean they could find, including those already in graves that hadn't been dead for too long. And then they moved here." Ranma grimaced. "I've even heard mages that say the sheer amount of necromancy used to raise so many people permanently damaged the mana flows around here. Whatever that means. But for some reason, necromancers can't stay in North Korea for long without just dropping dead, and when people die around here, their corpses usually raise themselves. There's probably other things too, but people that're strong with magic can't stand to be around here."  
  
K trembled mightily, horrific images bouncing into his mind. "That... that's incredible... a whole nation..."  
  
Ranma nodded. "The army stationed here was pretty freaked at first. An ocean of lumbering, animate corpses just came at them." Then he smirked again. "They wiped the zombies out, too."  
  
K raised an eyebrow. "There were that many soldiers here?"  
  
Ranma nodded. "Plus helicopters, tanks, and artillery. And planes would bomb the north end of the demilitarized zone with napalm, and roast hundreds of the zombies at a time." He pointed out at the charred wasteland ahead. "Most of this was thick jungle before the battle started. The actual former demilitarized zone doesn't start until about half a kilometer over there," he gestured into the wasteland that stretched out before them. "They would have actually done more extensive bombing over North Korea, but planes had a habit of disappearing during missions, if you know what I mean. We were still unfamiliar with magic."  
  
"So the human army killed all the zombies?" K asked skeptically.  
  
Ranma nodded. "Pretty much, yeah. They just lumbered forward slowly, and were cut apart by bullets, blasted with artillery, or they stepped on mines. Hell, even when they came forward in such waves that a few managed to reach the front lines when they were busy reloading, there wasn't a soldier there that wasn't good enough in hand-to-hand to put down an unarmed zombie grunt. The undead were wiped out as fast as they arrived, bodies being buried under ash and shrapnel, and ash and shrapnel being buried under bodies. This lasted for four straight days."  
  
The wanderer took off his backpack, and dug around for his canteen. "The guy I spoke to said that it stopped feeling like a war. After a full twenty-four hours, commanders were setting up schedules for meal and sleep shifts. You'd spend every waking moment spitting bullets at zombies, and when somebody tapped you on the shoulder, you handed him your gun and reload bucket - they had actually started to just hand out buckets of spare clips - and found a comfortable spot behind the lines to eat and then sleep. By the second day, people were taking regular breaks for coffee and to rest their arms, because they were sore from the constant gun recoil. Nobody on our side was dying; it was just like a big, nightmarish shooting gallery." He took a long drink for his canteen.  
  
K, perceptive as he was, obviously saw where this was going. After all, he knew that South Korea wasn't one of the countries that had survived the Death March. "But...?"  
  
Ranma sighed and put down the canteen. "BUT, we lost anyway, and not because of some magic spell that nobody could have seen coming. By the second day, the artillery units had run out of ammunition for their guns, which had pounded the thickest waves of zombies. So the men manning the guns helped out the front infantry by taking shifts with the rifles. They were the first ones to really notice, on the third day, that the supply convoy was late. Nobody else really noticed, or thought about it, because they had been left with a HUGE cache of ammo and supplies at their disposal. After four solid days of constant shooting, though, that cache ran dry, and the retreat was ordered. Of course, THAT'S when the Three Legions appeared."  
  
Ranma took a quick swig from the canteen again, then shook his head as he swallowed. "The rest is history. Only an eighth of the defense forces made it to the evacuation aircraft alive, and, unfortunately, most of the rest made it to the aircraft dead, if you catch my drift. They did find the supply convoy, though; or at least, the black spot where it had been. I can't imagine how the demons thought of something like that, but I'm sure slipping by the front lines to take out the trucks and escorts was easy as hell." He again raised the canteen to his lips, and an uneasy silence settled over the man and his draconian companion.  
  
Finally, K broke that silence. "It sounds like him."  
  
Ranma blinked as he screwed the cap onto his canteen. "What?"  
  
"Demetrius. Demetrius Yaermon. He was the general of the Three Legions. Specially sanctioned by the Council, his campaign in Earth Realm was supposed to be legendary victory. As you humans whittled away at the other demon armies, Yaermon kept positioning his army, used sabotage and greater magics, and won battle after battle completely. He was convinced that he was destined to cleanse the realm of its current rulers, and wipe out the humans that were holed up in the western continents."  
  
Ranma snorted. "Yeah. And he failed. Rule #1 of Earth Realm: You screw with the U.S.A., and the only plan you'll need is a will." Then he frowned. "How come you know so much about this?"  
  
K yawned, stretching his metal wings out before scraping them together at the edges, like knives being sharpened against each other. "I've spent a couple years locked up in various rooms and cages. Usually I have nothing better to do than read, so I'll ask a guard for a book that's lying around in whatever treasure stash I'm sitting on top of, and he won't find any reason to refuse." Then the metadragon smirked. "Also, I was mostly imprisoned in the company of demons, and demons capable of speech talk a lot about war rumors. It was big news when America killed Yaermon."  
  
Ranma grunted and started rummaging in his backpack for food. "I'll bet. Stupid demons." He pulled out a few apples for K, and grabbed a chunk of bread for himself.  
  
"Eat up quickly," he said, tossing the fruit to his companion, "even years later, the Korean North/South border is famous for random zombie attacks. If we go to sleep here, we'll probably be waking up at all hours of the night to fight off the undead."  
  
K would have gulped, but didn't want his apple to land on the dirty, ashen ground, so instead he concentrated his energy on snatching the bright red fruit out of the air with his beak.  
  
Ranma himself took out a loaf of bread and took a big bite out of it at he stood up. *Gulp* "We'll go south into the urban ruins. They're the easiest places to set up protected settlements, so I'm sure we'll find a base or village there."  
  
K didn't answer as he gnawed away at his apple, and lifted up into the air to land on Ranma's shoulder as the young man began to wander into the wasteland of craters.  
  
The journey proved to be uneventful, but Ranma was on his guard. The air was so heavy with the dusty smell of constant, aged decay, and the ground so powerfully radiated the unnatural energies of necromancy that his extra-sensory perceptions were totally off-center. He could FEEL danger around him, but it didn't seem to have any perceptible source; it was like feeling the humidity from a lake without even being sure that there was a lake nearby.  
  
By the time the sun had fallen K and Ranma had crossed over much of the ashen wastes of the demilitarized zone, and they could see the beginnings of former civilization in the distance (recognizable by the presence of actual rocks that might have once been buildings, rather than big holes and fossilizing juga limbs).  
  
Ranma also noted that as night fell, a sort of fog seemed to fall over the area, quickly reducing the already falling visibility heavily.  
  
Despite this, he still noticed immediately when he saw a small book lying on the ground. "Hey, what's that?"  
  
K didn't notice the book, because he was more interested in the full-grown black wyrm that was lying on the ground nearby. From a distance, with the fog rolling in, it didn't seem much different from the other corpses littering the area that were too large or resilient to decompose quickly, but from up close he could see that this body seemed better preserved than the others; understandable, since black wyrms were a good deal tougher than other types.  
  
Ranma leaned down and picked up the paperback book. He had noticed the wyrm too, but as it was obviously dead, like everything else around here, he hadn't bothered to observe it further. An item of literature, however, sitting out in the open was worth a good look. He wasn't able to make out the title, as it was covered in blood and dirt, but the inside was still mostly clean and readable.  
  
K swallowed the last of his apple, and then shivered as he continued observing the dead wyrm. Huge, jagged chunks of the beast's armor was missing, no doubt blown off by some manner of human weapon. Most humans were notoriously frail, but they were surprising adept at destroying things despite.  
  
"Let's see here... it looks like a travel guide. 'Wyoming, United States: Primary industries: Importing gas and cars so people can leave, toxic waste disposal, and complex computer systems that result in geeks with weird super powers.' Odd. 'Official state motto: Coming soon - Plumbing! Official state bird: Left before it died of radiation poisoning. Official State food: Sucks.'"  
  
K wasn't really listening to Ranma. He was staring more intently at the wyrm corpse.  
  
"'Wyoming used to be the home of a hardy population of almost 100 people, and used to include many nature-themed attractions, by which we mean Yellowstone Park. Unfortunately, due to a mix-up at the White House, the President ended up ordering Wyoming to be evacuated so that it could act as the test site for the magitek nova bomb prototype, apparently unaware that the sparsely populated state was actually part of the nation. His staff immediately approved the site, and Yellowstone Park and it's nearby towns were evacuated just hours before the new nova bomb converted the whole Yellowstone area and its surrounding areas into a boiling lake of plasma. A giant sign was erected next to the test site after it cooled, which enjoys roughly four times the tourism of the entire state of Wyoming previous to the test.'"  
  
"Uh... Ranma?"  
  
"Hmm?" Ranma closed the book, and then noticed something else in a nearby crater. "Hey! It's a backpack!"  
  
"R-Ranma..."  
  
Jogging over to the crater, the pigtailed adventurer reached down and pulled it up. "Whoa! This is pretty heavy! Wonder who was lugging this around?" Dropping the pack on the lip of the crater, Ranma noted that most of the weight was concentrated in the large red umbrella that was mounted atop the pack and held in place by several straps.  
  
"R-R-Ra-"  
  
"Hey! There's good food in here!" Ranma shouted, removing several wrapped packages. "Wow. Wrapped fish and fresh fruit! Score!" Then he frowned, looking up.  
  
"Ra... RAAAA-"  
  
"Huh," Ranma mumbled, still ignoring K's incoherent mumbling, "nobody would leave stuff like this and just forget it. I wonder what happened to its owner."  
  
"Grrrrrrrr... gyaaarrrr..." a low, unearthly moan floated to his ears, and Ranma shook his head sadly.  
  
"Well, I guess that answers that question." Ranma then turned around, to try and see if he could find the body. "Maybe I can at least give the owner a... proper...... burial........."  
  
Ranma swallowed. Facing him was the exact same deceased wyrm that he had noticed before, still quite deceased, but moving despite that. Flaps of skin and bits of gore hung from the hole-ridden, bony armor frame as the undead beast stared down at its prey, despite both eyes having rotted right out of its head. Ranma supposed that he must have been pretty out of it not to notice something so big and clumsy as a zombie wyrm moving behind him; he had been trying to use his ki senses more than normal, and had forgotten to adjust once those senses had been rendered useless by the general area.  
  
"GrrrrrRRRRRAAAAAUGH!!" The zombie wyrm let out a guttural roar from its rotting, disjointed jaw, and Ranma squeezed his eyes shut as little chunks of flesh and gore, accompanied by a light spray of blood, peppered his body.  
  
*Shlop!* He winced as a large, wet object plastered itself to his face. On the plus side, it didn't feel like a major organ or body part, but on the minus side, everything about this situation indicated that it was still bad.  
  
Feeling K evacuate his shoulder and fly away, Ranma stiffly raised a hand and pulled the object off his face before opening his eyes.  
  
"Huh. Why do I feel like I should recognize this?" The object turned out to be a bandanna, soaked through with blood and peppered with skull fragments. It was difficult to tell with the low light and the heavy stain, but Ranma guessed that originally the bandanna had been some sort of light color, with black spots on it.  
  
"RANMA!!! LOOK OUT!!!" K screamed, flying backward across the uneven landscape as he watched the deceased pseudo-dragon's maw descend.  
  
*Crr-UNCH!* It was too late. The zombie wyrm's broken, but ultimately functional jaw made a sickening grinding noise as it closed around Ranma's form, digging into the ashen ground.  
  
"R... Ranma..."  
  
The undead beast threw its head up, and then began snapping its jaws repeatedly in the air.  
  
K stared at the scene, horrified, and allowed himself to drop down onto the edge of a crater. "Ranma... no... RANMAAAAA!!" The tiny dragon cried, squeezing its eyes shut as he felt a cold, unforgiving pain settle inside him.  
  
"Oh, will you cut it out?!"  
  
K's head snapped up, and his eyes widened in shock as he saw Ranma's head poke out of one of the holes in the zombie wyrm's skull. "Wha?"  
  
"Calm down, wouldya?" Ranma reprimanded, apparently not bothered by the zombie's thrashing (though he was holding his nose shut). "I'm fine. The secret is to keep your arms and legs in so that they don't get bitten off, and then crawl deeper into the mouth. Zombies don't eat, they just kill, so as long as you stay out of the teeth you're fine."  
  
K blinked. Then he scowled. "You bastard!! I thought you were dead!!"  
  
"What? And now you're angry that I'm not?" Smirking, Ranma ducked back into the wyrm's skull.  
  
"NO, I'm angry because you just stood there and let yourself get snapped up without saying anything!" K protested, flapping his wings anxiously.  
  
"Whine, whine, whine..."  
  
By now the zombie wyrm itself was quite agitated, as all the muscles and organs that were used to deal with food BEYOND biting it hadn't been working for quite some time. Thus, it had no way of either getting the human back into its jaws, or getting the human farther down into its body.  
  
Being a zombie in the first place, never mind one that hadn't been directly created (this particular corpse had been reanimated by the imbalance of necromantic energy), the wyrm didn't possess much in the way of problem-solving skills. It's difficult to tell if a live wyrm would have handled the situation better, but needless to say, the undead beast simply continued to snap its jaws violently, perhaps hoping that human would slide back down into them.  
  
"Aha! Here we are!" *Crack!*  
  
*Thud!* The wyrm's skull fell heavily onto the ground, having had its neck severed, and possessing no other tissue capable of holding the 200 pound dead weight to the rest of the body.  
  
Of course, the rest of the body didn't exactly have anything keeping it up either, and had been separated from its primary control center. *Crash!*  
  
K frowned deeply as Ranma pulled himself out of a hole in the wyrm's carapace, and turned away sharply as the wanderer approached. "You are SUCH a jerk."  
  
Ranma smiled brightly, and then kneeled down to pat the metadragon on the head. "Awwwww... were you THAT worried about me?"  
  
"Yes, I was!" K said in a huff, drawing his wings and head down.  
  
"All right, fine, I'm sorry I worried you." Still smiling, Ranma snatched the tiny dragon up and perched him on top of the backpack. "Now how about we eat all this guy's stuff and move on, huh? He 'aint gonna use it."  
  
K sighed and nodded, not really feeling up to remaining angry at his escort in the middle of a dangerous, zombie-infested wasteland. "Okay... so what's in there?" Then he winced as his tiny stomach growled (which made a noise that was really more like the sound of a golf ball inside a dryer than a growl). Odd. Apples weren't that filling, but he had eaten relatively recently and was still REALLY hungry.  
  
Ranma began digging around in the backpack. "Man, how did this guy get a hold of all this stuff? Do they sell this kind of stuff anywhere NEAR Korea? And it's not old, either!" Marveling at the food items, Ranma started taking out the plastic bags with various fruits inside, from lush red grapes to ripe tropical mangos. After that came a box with several sandwiches in it, and some butcher paper with well-cut fish filets that didn't look to be more than a day old.  
  
"Huh... that's weird... this is isn't in any Asian language... looks European..." Ranma was staring intently at the print on the box containing the sandwiches. It was written using the roman alphabet, and didn't spell out any words that he could recognize, in any language. Also, there were no translations. "Looks like it's French or Italian or something. Hmmm... musta gotten it at a U.S. base somewhere." American military outposts were well known for being the best and most reliable sources of supplies and aid, and they had inevitably become the centerpieces for many of the more prosperous wasteland settlements. They were also the only place Ranma could think of that would sell sandwiches and fresh fruit like this, since most of the supplies were imported.  
  
*Groan*  
  
Ranma raised an eyebrow and looked down, having heard a dismayed noise from his small metallic companion. Nothing really seemed to be wrong, however; K had ripped open the bag of fruit and was eagerly devouring a mango, so Ranma couldn't imagine what his problem was.  
  
After checking around to make sure there were no zombies in the vicinity (it had occurred to him that perhaps he had simply been mistaken in where the noise came from), he went back to digging through the backpack in search of useful items.  
  
"Not much other than clothes and camping gear." He already had enough of his own, and such things didn't sell for enough that it was worth carrying around along with his normal load.  
  
*Groan!*  
  
Ranma looked back down to see K panting with his head resting on the ground, surrounded by the ravaged rinds of three mangos and several bananas. "K? You all right?"  
  
The metadragon squeezed his eyes shut. "I... my stomach... hurts... oh... I think I'm gonna be sick..."  
  
Ranma blinked repeatedly, then moved back, an embarrassed expression on his face. "Oh! Oh! Sorry! Heh, can't be helped, really. I'll wash as soon as I find somewhere to do it." He had been carefully preventing himself from using his nose to breathe, so for the most part he had forgotten that he totally reeked of rotting flesh. Having chunks of chewed human spat out at you and then digging around inside a massive zombie had that effect.  
  
"N-No..." K mumbled weakly, shuddering.  
  
Ranma adopted a look of sincere concern, and kneeled over the metadragon while scanning for any physical signs of harm. "K? C'mon, snap out of it! What's wrong?"  
  
In moments K's health seemed to deteriorate, and he began to thrash wildly on the ground. "I... my... AUGH!! AAAaaassssSCRREEEEEEEE!!" A high-pitched screech, like the sound of a rotary saw slowly digging into a plate of steel, cut through the night air as K's normal telepathy-modified speech was suddenly stripped of the necessary mental augmentation needed to make it intelligible.  
  
Ranma winced, but leaned down and tried to hold the metadragon down in a prone position as best he could. Unfortunately, he had no idea if he was even supposed to do that much. Ranma was, despite being a seasoned traveler, ignorant to most diseases that could affect humans, never mind dragonkin. Then again, how could he even be sure that K was sick? Perhaps it was all the necromancy and stuff? Of course, he could fully explain just about one complex law of magic for every ten diseases he could describe (totaling one complex magic law and eleven common diseases), so he wasn't much better off in that case.  
  
"K... Hold on! I'm gonna get you outta here!" He gently picked up the struggling metadragon, ignoring K's agonizing screams, and quickly located his pack.  
  
*Chomp*  
  
Ranma froze as he felt his belt go taut, and then go slack again after something was ripped off of it.  
  
Looking down, his eyes widened as he beheld K gripping one of his spare .50 caliber ammunition clips in his front claws and chewing furiously on it.  
  
"Uh... K? Why are you eating my ammo?" Ranma asked curiously, watching as the tiny dragon gnawed like his life depended on it.  
  
*Chomp* *Krink* *Scrank* *Krrrunch*  
  
Ranma sweatdropped as K ate the casing of the clip and then snapped up the bullets one by one, only chewing a few times before swallowing the mangled projectiles mostly whole.  
  
Ranma frowned at this. On the plus side, K didn't look like he was suffering any more, but on the minus side, Ranma didn't really know what to do about having his companion eating items that were, in all likelihood, something of a health risk when ingested.  
  
*Chomp*  
  
Ranma blinked as he felt another tug on his belt, and then shouted in surprise as K ripped the other two spare clips free of his belt before jumping down to join them on the ground.  
  
"Hey! That's my spare ammo! Don't eat that! Stop! K....... aw, man..." Ranma massaged his forehead as the metadragon continued to eat, hoarding one clip close with his tail, while biting the top off the other and then holding it up in the air with his beak, such that all the bullets rolled straight down his throat.  
  
Ranma's eye twitched, but then turned around while rubbing his chin. "So... K eats metal now... okay, fair enough. I mean, he's MADE of metal, more or less, so it's not that strange." After a moment of thought, Ranma suddenly smiled and turned back toward his companion. "Hey K, I'll be right back. Don't go anywhere, all right?"  
  
*Gnash* *Crunch* *Chomp* *Gulp* K ignored him, totally engrossed in the process of devouring the large red umbrella's metal parts.  
  
Ranma sweatdropped, then turned away again and began to search the ground inside the craters, picking up all the little shards of metal that were spread haphazardly throughout. A great deal of shrapnel had been tossed around in the battle that had taken place here, so Ranma had no doubt that there'd be plenty of metal for K to feast on without having to feed the metadragon useful items.  
  
It wasn't long before he had collected many pieces of varying shapes and sizes (there had been enough choice that he was able to turn down any pieces that looked particularly sharp; he didn't know if K's throat was metal on the inside too, but he did know that he had absolutely no idea how to perform the Heimlich maneuver on a winged serpent).  
  
When he caught sight of his draconian friend, Ranma was surprised to see that he was finishing off a metal pole. Probably the pole of the umbrella. What made it surprising was the sheer speed with which K had eaten the other objects; Ranma was sure that he'd be finished with the umbrella by now.  
  
Then Ranma's eyes widened as he noticed that his backpack was lying on its side, ripped open. The metal rings and zippers had been torn off, and at a glance, it was clear that everything of metallic construction was missing. Including the last of his .50 caliber clips that Ranma didn't keep on him, his canteens, cooking ware, utensils, compass, and other miscellaneous traveling necessities.  
  
Ranma grit his teeth and was about to scream at the little dragon when something struck him; if K had gone into his backpack, then obviously he had finished up the umbrella soon after Ranma turned his back. If he had finished eating the umbrella, what was that he was munching on now? He didn't have any poles on him, and the final inch or so of unscathed metal was too well-preserved to have been found lying out in the wastes of the demilitarized zone. Well, he did have ONE pole on him, but that was...  
  
Eyes wide as dinner plates, Ranma very slowly looked down toward his belt.  
  
Then, trembling violently, he looked up again, just in time to see the last of his mithril-plated weapon get snapped up in the metadragon's beak.  
  
Time seemed to slow down to a crawl as K's tiny, pointed tongue darted out of his mouth and wrapped up against the outside of his lower beak, slowly sliding across the edge in a draconian imitation of someone licking his lips.  
  
"Oh, YEAH! Mithril is tough, but it is sooooooo good!"  
  
"K, YOU LITTLE BASTARD!!!"  
  
The metadragon jerked forward in surprise, then turned to see what he assumed to be a towering fire elemental stomping toward him.  
  
If it weren't for the figure raising its right fist malevolently and displaying the black, gem-laden gauntlet, it might have been some time before K realized that the approaching being was in fact his human companion.  
  
"You... you... you..." Ranma simply repeated that word over and over as he slowly stalked forward, raising both his hands in such a way that it looked like he was preparing to strangle something. "YOU ATE MY STAFF!!!"  
  
K blink-blinked. "Yeah. Tasted awesome, by the way."  
  
"DIE, YOU LITTLE WRETCH!!!" Ranma screamed, punching the ground hard and sending a wave of fiery ki toward the baby dragon.  
  
"Meep!" K jumped into the air and took flight as the fiery blast rolled under him and detonated in the middle of the crater he was sitting in front of. A fire attack wouldn't have really hurt him so much (he was all but fireproof, though the impact blast would have been painful), but he was somewhat shaken that Ranma was so angry.  
  
After a moment of hovering, his stomach grumbled some more (or screeched, whatever), and that nervousness gave way to annoyance.  
  
"Hey, chill! So what if I ate some metal pole? Get a new one! What's wrong with you?!"  
  
Ranma's entire body twitched. "Get a NEW one? A NEW one? A brand new, ENCHANTED-head, MITHRIL-plated, REINFORCED auto-pneumatic EXTENDABLE combat staff?! Are you out of your tiny mind, or is that just a big hunk of metal, too?! Do you have ANY idea what I went through to GET that thing?!"  
  
Considering what the answer obviously was, K took way too long to provide it. "............ Well, no, not really."  
  
"AAAAAARGH!!" Ranma clutched his face with both hands and fell forward onto his knees. "When I bought that, mithril was at the height of its demand! It took weeks for the smith to forge it right onto the compressor in the perfect size for it to work! He screwed up THREE TIMES and made ME pay for the mistakes since it made him waste materials!! I PAID A GODDAMN DRAGON'S HOARD FOR THAT STAFF!!! YOU UNDERSTAND THAT, YOU ALLOY ADDICT?!?! A FREAKING REAL DRAGON'S HOARD!!!"  
  
K continued to hover in silence, digesting that information. "Dude. You got ripped off."  
  
"AAAAAAAAUGH!!" Ranma fell to his knees and began honestly sobbing as he realized that the single biggest monetary investment of his life was truly lost forever within his companion's digestive tract (it didn't occur to him that he would be able to retrieve at least the metal again through the course of that digestion. Not that he would have cried any less if it had).  
  
In his state of distress, he almost didn't catch K's hungry look as the metadragon stared at him. Or, not exactly at him, but at something on him.  
  
"WHAT?!" Ranma yelled. "What more do you want from me, huh? The little steel loops on my boots? The BUTTONS ON MY VEST?? What else?! The coins I have in my pocket?! My gu-" Ranma's mouth jerked to a halt as he realized with startling clarity the only metal object of significant size he had on him.  
  
K lunged for the holster on Ranma's belt, beak snapping as he darted through the air at full speed.  
  
Fortunately for Ranma, he was WAY faster than K was. By the time the metadragon had even realized his target had moved, Ranma was already a good ten meters away, and holding his Nighthawk .50 caliber pistol behind his back protectively.  
  
"You get your filthy beak away from my gun, or I swear on every Goddamn temple in Taer'Kul that I'm gonna gut you and use you as a new canteen!!" Ranma grit his teeth and breathed heavily, feeling the strain as his anger fought his determination to NOT kill his friend.  
  
K hovered in the air, grinning. "Oh, come now... it's just a gun... not even made of precious metals, like that staff..."  
  
Ranma's eye twitched. "The only way you're getting this gun is if I feed it to you the hard way, you got that?!" Then again, Ranma wasn't even sure if a bullet could hurt K. He did have all that metal armor.  
  
"What's your problem?" K complained irritably. "It's just a gun! You can buy a new one!"  
  
Gritting his teeth, Ranma forced himself to calm down, though he still made sure to keep a good distance away from the metal munching dragon.  
  
"FIRST of all, this was a gift, all right? From someone who was very close to me. So it's not just whether or not I can get a new one. SECOND of all, since you haven't noticed, this is the only weapon I have left! I broke my sword stabbing trench coat guy, and now you ate my staff and extra ammo! I only have twelve shots before I'm forced to use hand-to-hand!"  
  
K considered that for a moment. "So? You seem really good at hand-to-hand."  
  
"THAT'S NOT THE POINT METAL HEAD!!!" Ranma yelled angrily. "And THIRD of all, I don't have the money to go buying up guns of this quality! Thanks to you I have to buy supplies to replace everything that had any metal in it, plus ammunition! I've only got $20 American, some spare change, and a little sack of gold coins!"  
  
K blinked. "Huh... $20 you say? American?"  
  
Calming slightly, Ranma crossed his arms over his chest. "Yeah. 'Cause the US outposts act as supply centers and accept US cash, a lot of settlements ended up using it too. And it's more stable in value than gold, too, but still, nobody turns down gold anywhere."  
  
K continued to stare at Ranma semi-thoughtfully as he hovered in the air. "So... $20 American... how much does that buy?"  
  
Ranma frowned. "Why are you so fixated on the $20?"  
  
"Because it's paper," K answered honestly, "and gold is not."  
  
A long moment of silence passed between the two traveling companions, the air dead. Every flap of K's wings, as sharp and efficient as the motions were, seemed to pulse through the stillness of the night like the sound of a drum, beating to the rhythm of isolated life.  
  
"Uh... I think I'd better fly away now!"  
  
____________________________________________________________________________________  
  
"Graaaaaa..." "Hraaugh..." "Muuuuuh..."  
  
In the small field next to the South Korean border (where it used to be, anyway), a small group of zombies milled around brainlessly, groaning into the fog that obscured the night. Nobody was sure why the zombies congregated in certain areas, but then, the only people adept enough with magic to understand in the first place why the undead spontaneously sprung from the North Korean wasteland avoided the area like the plague it probably was.  
  
The zombies, raised of pure unstable necromancy, had no master, no command, or direction. For days upon years, until finally too much of their brains rotted away to remain active, they shambled along the craters of the demilitarized zone, drawn by some unfathomable energy flowing through the Earth, as well as the zombie's single driven purpose as a destroyer of life.  
  
*Thack!* A knife, thrown from the shadows, embedded itself in one zombie's head, causing the animated corpse to stagger as its brain was pierced by sharpened steel.  
  
*Tack!* *Thunk!* *Thwack!* Several more sharpened throwing blades struck the undead's head, all of them deliberately thrown as to avoid smashing the zombie's skull like an overripe watermelon.  
  
"Very good. Finish now," said a voice from the foliage beyond the undead gathering.  
  
*Whsh* A light chakra, designed for maximum accuracy and initiative, zipped through the air into the rotted gathering, slicing right through the afflicted zombie's neck with such ease that the circular blade didn't make a sound as it ripped through its target.  
  
*Thud* The re-deceased man stumbled to the ground, his knife-infested skull rolling along behind him.  
  
Behind the shadowed protection of the foliage, a tall man in a black bodysuit retracted his arm and began to take stock of his remaining weapons.  
  
Beside him, an elderly man in gray robes nodded. He had large, heavy wrinkles, was fairly short but not absurdly so, and also had a long, gray beard, though the top of his head was bare. "Good. You improve much, David. It not long now before you get rank of full Ninja."  
  
"Thank you, Master," the tall trainee said in Japanese before stepping back.  
  
The elderly man nodded. "Kim, you next. Use many knife, one throw."  
  
Another man stepped up out of the line of trainees behind the lines of foliage, of which all of them were wearing the same type of black, skin-tight bodysuit.  
  
As the trainee named Kim moved up toward the gathering spot to take his shot, a ghastly moan was heard from behind the line of trainees. Oddly enough, the Ninja ignored it.  
  
The zombie lumbered along with surprising speed toward the row of crouching youths, and then raised its arm in a wasteful preparation for a clumsy attack.  
  
*Shick!* One of the trainees, whose tight-fitting bodysuit identified her only as "female", stood up and made a lightning-fast motion with her arm, and in the next moment the zombie stood shock-still, as if frozen. Then a wash of blood spilled over the corpse's shoulders, and it toppled backward, its head rolling off into the bushes.  
  
This encounter was ignored by the rest of the group; being able to behead a single zombie in melee combat was hardly an accomplishment even worth watching.  
  
Kim had slipped four throwing knives out of his thigh pocket and had taken them into his hand. Taking a deep breath, he moved his hand forward in a sharp, jagged motion, designed to subtly manipulate the paths of all his weapons.  
  
*Thack!* *Thack!* *Wssh* *Thwip* Two knives stuck solidly in the face and chest of the target zombie, with the third just grazing a shoulder and the fourth missing by centimeters.  
  
Kim merely stood rigidly, awaiting the response to his failure.  
  
"You improve. Take other zombie on right and practice. Natalie, you-" the old Ninja master stopped suddenly.  
  
"Master Matsute? Is something wrong?" The female Ninja asked, readying her arm blade once again.  
  
The old man narrowed his eyes. "Possibly. Something come. We be ready to go. Ancient proverb say: 'He who know not when to flee often get spleen ripped out and eaten.'"  
  
The trainees all sweatdropped.  
  
"I take it you weren't exactly quoting from Sun Tzu's Art of War, huh?" David remarked dryly.  
  
Nonetheless, the Ninja all moved into more mobile positions, awaiting whatever was coming. If Matsute had noticed it, it had to be something more dangerous than a human zombie; such creatures never approached with enough energy to startle anyone. More likely it was one of the other zombified creatures that had risen in the shattered wasteland, like a wyrm or juga.  
  
They all had their own expectations. However, none of them had anything to do with a tiny, panicking dragon made out of metal.  
  
"YOW!!" K yelled, blasting through one of the thin walls of foliage that had formed near the south end of the demilitarized zone.  
  
Immediately he realized that he had run into a pack of zombies, but even as small as he was, the creatures really didn't present any real danger without any weapons or control.  
  
"Get outta the way, you stiffs!!" Spreading his wings out fully, K did a barrel roll while flying foward, his blade-edged wings slicing haphazardly into the surrounding deceased.  
  
Blood spattered onto the ground in a mess as the metadragon shoved through, and then took to the air to try and reach the relative safety of the trees.  
  
The Ninja continued hiding, even as they all stared critically at the metal-plated dragon, wondering what such a creature was doing out here, and why it looked to be in such a hurry (since it obviously had little to fear from the common zombies).  
  
"N-Now Ranma! Just c-cool it! Violence is NEVER the answer!" K shouted hopefully toward the wall of trees he had come from, not completely cognizant of what exactly he was saying.  
  
*Snap!* *Rustle* The sounds of heavy boots moving carelessly through the brush was heard from beyond the foggy clearing, and a shadowy, human shape emerged, stalking forward at a brisk, perfectly steady pace.  
  
"Come on, man! I'm sorry! I told you I was sorry! We'll find more gold!" K babbled thoughtlessly.  
  
Ranma's eyes narrowed even further as he looked up at the tree branch. "We?" He asked, ignoring the zombies that took notice of him and began lumbering forward.  
  
"Ah heh heh heh..." K chuckled nervously. "Well... I can help! I can talk to people you don't understand, and, uh..."  
  
*Thrak!* One zombie ventured close enough to touch Ranma, and for its trouble, the pigtailed wanderer punched straight through its head, snapping his arm back to his side before the inanimate corpse even started to fall to the ground.  
  
"Er... I suppose that I could share all the information I have! I know a lotta stuff about demons and all!" K said semi-cheerfully.  
  
*Shrak!* Ranma grabbed and ripped off the arm of one zombie attempting to punch him, and then flipped the arm up in the air before catching it again at the wrist. *Thock!* He then deposited the rotting limb into its owner's mouth, knuckles first.  
  
K gulped. Ranma didn't seem to be getting any angrier at him, but the displays of brutal violence were quite intimidating. Being a metadragon, K was notoriously tough despite his size and youth, but Ranma, as a human, quite exceeded any conceivable concept of "tough".  
  
Ranma growled as he launched a lightning side-kick that took a zombie's torso clean off. He was trying to stare down his draconian companion, but to be honest, venting on the pack of undead was proving more therapeutic than he would have guessed, and he felt his urge to try and build a toaster from K's hollowed-out armor quickly fading.  
  
"Grrrrrrrr..." "Muuuuuuh..."  
  
Ranma snorted and raised his left fist into the air, streams of fire coalescing up his arm from nowhere. "Flash fyre!" He yelled, sending thin waves of flame cutting into the small group to his left. The zombies, being of cheap and unstable make (even for zombies), had huge, flaming gouges cut into them from the attack, and quickly lit ablaze.  
  
Ranma cast a bored, apathetic gaze toward the few remaining zombies on the other side of him, and casually swiped his left hand in that direction. The undead beasts were quickly engulfed in flames, and began struggling mindlessly as they collapsed onto the ground, fire consuming their broken, fragile bodies.  
  
Up in his tree, K gulped and held his head down with his wings covering it, hoping that it made him look especially cute and harmless. Which it did, but Ranma was concerned with other things at the moment.  
  
Frowning deeply, Ranma stuck his hands in his pockets and glared openly at the shrubbery below K's perch. "All right, I know you're there, and I know you're alive, so you might as well show yourself!"  
  
There was hushed command issued from behind the foliage, and after a few moments, Ranma was faced with the ominous sight of a row of black-clothed figures stalking toward him through the trees.  
  
"Oh, great," he mumbled irritably, "Ninja..."  
  
One of the shorter figures stood forward and crossed his arms over his chest.  
  
"Begone, sorcerer. This territory belongs to us, and you're encroaching upon it. Withdraw at once, or suffer the consequences."  
  
Ranma and K (who had just realized that there were people under him), raised an eyebrow each.  
  
Then a low chuckle came from behind one of the taller Ninja trainees, and the old master stepped forward through the haze of fog into the clearing.  
  
"Ah, Kim, you do well to note that this one not sorcerer. Ancient proverb say: 'Do not judge a pimp by his duds.'"  
  
Everybody present sweatdropped, though the trainees all nodded respectfully.  
  
Ranma scratched his head. "What the hell are a bunch of Ninja doing out on the edge of the Korean demilitarized zone? And why do you all speak Japanese?"  
  
"We don't owe you any explanations, vagrant," the Ninja who had spoken before, Kim, said snidely. "Leave. Now."  
  
Ranma's eye twitched, and he felt some of his recently faded frustration return. "You know, I'm getting real sick of your attitude, jerk."  
  
The aforementioned jerk smirked. "Oh? And what are you going to do about it?"  
  
*Th-wack!* The Ninja trainees all flinched back as their companion was sent hurtling into the foliage, launched by a snap kick that very few of them saw coming.  
  
Ranma snorted, and was about to turn back toward the old man, when he sensed movement behind him. A quick glance down confirmed that a kodachi had been positioned before his neck, ready to slice open his throat at the barest twitch from the person behind him.  
  
"On your knees, now," David commanded, "Natalie, go check if Kim is alright."  
  
Ranma, predictably, didn't do as he was told. "You an American?"  
  
David blinked. "Wh-What?"  
  
"You sound like it," Ranma said conversationally, "and you're pretty tall for a Korean. It's just that I thought, you know, that an American would know better than to attack, with a knife, someone who's armed with a gun."  
  
*K-click* The taller man gaped as he realized that he now had a pistol barrel pressed to the side of his head, and froze in disbelief.  
  
'How the hell did he draw and aim without me noticing?'  
  
Ranma smirked slightly as he stared straight ahead. "Your blade or my bullet. Which do you think'll kill first?"  
  
"David!" The female Ninja of the group shouted in distress. All around, the other trainees trained their weapons on Ranma, but didn't dare to throw them.  
  
Beads of sweat collected on the American's brow. "N-Now just d-drop the gun... nobody has to die... just-"  
  
"Oh, will you knock it off?!" Everybody present blinked in surprise as the pretty much forgotten metadragon shouted in irritation. "Ranma, you KNOW you're not gonna plug the guy. Stop messing with him!"  
  
The pigtailed fighter snorted. "Man, you're no fun, you know that?" With a slight twisting motion he shoved himself back into the Ninja while angling his elbow up to knock the kodachi away from his neck. A moment later David frantically ducked under a roundhouse kick, only to get punched away a moment later.  
  
"Too slow, loser!" Ranma laughed, jumping away from a number of projectiles that were launched toward his back.  
  
Backflipping and landing in a crouch, Ranma slowly rose and raised one hand in front of him, beckoning for the others to attack.  
  
Only, the others were quite absorbed with staring in horror at their American peer, who apparently hadn't possessed the dexterity, after being struck in the jaw with a corkscrew punch, to dodge the projectiles that had missed Ranma.  
  
The pigtailed wanderer blinked, then winced. "Ouch. I hope those weren't poisoned or nothing."  
  
Then he sweatdropped as he was exposed to the hostile glares of seven other armed Ninja, who began to ready their weapons and advance.  
  
"Stop!"  
  
Luckily, the trainees all winced and froze at their master's shout.  
  
Ranma raised an eyebrow as the aging Ninjitsu master stepped toward him, shaking his head at his students.  
  
"I very disappointed in you. Foe appear and attack one of our own, and you all rush right ahead like brawler? I training Ninja, not professional hockey team!"  
  
The students all winced and hung their heads sadly. Matsute slowly approached David and evaluated his condition briefly.  
  
"David, you do good. Approach well. Still get ass beat good, but technique good too." He turned. "Natalie! You pull knives and shuriken out of David, yes?"  
  
"R-Right away, Master," the young woman said, rushing to the American's side.  
  
The old man frowned at the other trainees. "The rest of you take good look at what happen! Learn lesson! Lesson one!" He pointed at Kim, who was standing again, if dizzily, and holding his head. "To provoke stranger on ground, to face, and when stranger have gun is very, very stupid! Ancient proverb say: 'Talk trash to armed man when cops no looking, and you asking for cap in ass!'"  
  
"Yes, Master," the trainees mumbled while bowing (though the gesture might have been caused by the weight of the sweatdrops on their heads).  
  
By this time K had decided that Ranma's anger had passed, and so had his own sudden lust to ingest processed ore, so he floated down onto his companion's shoulder. "Man, what is up with the old man?"  
  
"You got me," Ranma muttered, "though you can't really argue with the whole 'wisdom' thing."  
  
"Lesson two!" Matsute pointed to the other trainees. "Never assume that your weapon will hit! Always must plan for worst case! Would add proverb, but you all see what happen."  
  
"Yes, Master..."  
  
"Lesson three!" The master continued, not changing the particular people he was addressing. "Never assume you faster or more skilled than target! You all see stranger beat Kim, then David, and you all attack! You no straight attack superior enemy, not even if you have many ally! Ancient proverb say: 'What wrong with you?! Have you no seen Jackie Chan movies?!'"  
  
"Yes, Master," the trainees echoed once more, feeling rather silly about the whole situation.  
  
Matsute nodded sharply. "Good. I hope you also note technique and skill that stranger use, and learn from it. Is level of skill that expected from true master of Shisou style Ninjitsu."  
  
Finally, the old man turned toward Ranma, a serious expression on his face. "Finally, lesson four for you. It not wise attack many Ninja in front of Ninja master, even if you very strong. Ancient proverb say: 'Is stupid to attack group of Ninja, especially before Ninja master.'"  
  
"Uh, that's almost exactly what you just said," Ranma informed him dryly.  
  
Matsute smirked dangerously. "That because I make proverb."  
  
"Riiiiiight..." Ranma mumbled. "Look, you're a real fossil man, but I wouldn't exactly call you aaaAAAAYAAAAAAAAH!!"  
  
*WHAM!!* Ranma's totally unexpected flight ended with him sailing into and through one of the larger, heavier trees surrounding the area, causing an explosion of splinters to rain over the thin foliage.  
  
K was likewise caught totally off-guard, though since he wasn't the target, he merely experienced the shock of having his perch violently ripped out from under him. "HOLY MOTHER!!"  
  
Matsute stood calmly on the edge of the clearing; to the common observer, it merely appeared as if he had simply moved much closer to where Ranma had been standing.  
  
"Note now, I attack while stranger busy being wiseass. This give advantage, as stranger not notice me build up energy for attack." The Ninja trainees all nodded seriously, giving their full attention.  
  
"Hey now old geezer, you'd better watch it," K protested, "this guy isn't to be taken lightly!"  
  
"What the lizard said," Ranma muttered irritably, slowly rising. Glaring at the Ninja master, the wanderer turned his neck fully to either side, dull popping noises coming from his aching body. "You won't get away with that."  
  
Matsute nodded as the young man began to stalk toward him. "You note now that stranger get right back up and press attack. In other martial art, this considered good thing; show great will and inner strength. In Ninjitsu, is commonly known as 'stupid'."  
  
"Why don't you shut your mouth old man, before your dentures fall out," Ranma growled, preparing to launch forward. Then, he suddenly realized that he could see the slightest tensing of the Ninja master; obviously the old man was prepared to move, and would do so well before Ranma was going to reach him.  
  
A mere twitch of motion and the aging master became a blur. Ranma was already moving into a defensive stance and preparing to recover from a lightning-fast hit, but to his surprise the blur merely split into two separate blurs and dashed off into the surrounding fog, where they became indistinguishable from any other vague, shapeless image that he could see.  
  
With his senses still a little off-kilter, Ranma was grimacing as he watched several flashes of light appear from seemingly random point all around him. "This... is going to hurt."  
  
*Wham!* *Pow!* *Smash!* *Crack!* Waves of Matsute-shaped ki images burst out of the fog and slammed into Ranma one by one, knocking the adventurer straight into the path of the next image, such that Ranma soon found himself being batted around in the air by pulse after punishing pulse of unreasonably solid kinetic energy.  
  
*Thud!* As Ranma landed heavily on the ground, the master Matsute landed in front of him, facing the trainees.  
  
"You note now that I use environment to advantage; what enemy cannot see, he have considerable difficulty hitting. Strategy essential to combat! This what happen to person that not use strategy!" Matsute pointed at Ranma. Ranma twitched violently, and began to push himself off the ground.  
  
Off on the sidelines, the female Ninja Natalie chuckled. "What a fool. He keeps getting up only to be put back down."  
  
"Fool? Ha!" K hovered over to that general area, glad to be close enough to see the fight through the fog, but far enough away so that he didn't risk getting clobbered. "Taking on a wyvern or a black wyrm by yourself is foolish! If your master is half as wise as he makes himself out to be, he'll back down before Ranma gets serious!"  
  
Kim snorted arrogantly as he rubbed his tender bruises. "Oh, I'm sure. You back him up now, but the guy's obviously out of his league!"  
  
K fumed as several of the other Ninjas nodded in agreement.  
  
A moment of silence passed as Ranma stood up fully and cracked his back into alignment.  
  
Sitting on the ground cross-legged, David frowned. "So, uh... who was it that took on a black wyrm?"  
  
"I've had about enough of YOU!!" Not waiting for the old man to gather strength a third time, Ranma immediately launched attack after attack, throwing waves of punches at his opponent.  
  
It didn't really surprise him that none of them seemed to connected. Every image that he struck at seemed to fade away as his fist pounded through, forcing him to readjust his next attack at the slightly more stable image that suddenly formed several inches back. To his credit, Ranma was gaining ground and punching at such a rate that Matsute couldn't find a good opening to either attack or gain good distance.  
  
Matsute CERTAINLY wasn't going to allow this young punk fresh off the sand dunes to actually touch him; it would be a hideous tarnish upon his reputation among his students. But at the same time, the young man was actually holding out far better than he could have possibly expected, especially considering the wounds he had already taken. Was it possible that this boy wasn't human?  
  
After a moment that he spent dodging two knife-hand strikes and jumping over a quick sweep, Matsute decided that it was not. The teenager appeared completely human to his mind's eye, and not even as spiritually powerful as the Ninja master had guessed. Really, Matsute had to assume that he was faking this seemingly invincible constitution.  
  
Ranma, meanwhile, was desperately trying to work out a strategy while throwing out as many low-energy punches as possible to buy himself time.  
  
Unfortunately, not being able to let up your attacks while also trying to decide upon a long-term course of action is a difficult thing to do, and a slightly more powerful kick, with a split-second longer recovery time, was all that the Ninja master needed.  
  
*Thwack!* Ranma jerked backward as an open-palm strike slammed into his solar plexus, and was distracted enough that he couldn't even make out the next attack, which sent him hurtling a good two meters away before he slammed face-down into the ashen ground that spread across the general area.  
  
Matsute landed lightly an arm's length away, shaking his head sadly. "You get hurt bad, and still you get up and fight. Why you do this? Why you get hurt over nothing?"  
  
Ranma twitched, and slowly rose up so that he was sitting on his legs, facing away from the aging master. "Why? Why?! I don't lose to wrinkled old humans, you geezer! I've killed things that hit way harder than you!"  
  
Matsute snorted. "I not doubt it, though you have lot of arrogance and bravado for someone in this day and age. You think wandering in wastes for as long as you obviously have would teach some humility." He shook his head sadly, and clicked his tongue. "Well, can't be helped. But out of respect for you strength stranger, and because there really no good reason for us be fighting, I willing to call this off on draw. How that sound, boy?" The aging master grinned. He knew that the wanderer would never accept; for someone who obviously had so much pride, accepting a "draw" that was really a surrender would have been far more humiliating than simply losing honestly.  
  
These were exactly Ranma's thoughts, though he didn't phrase them very well as he mumbled unintelligibly.  
  
"What was that?" Matsute asked, raising an eyebrow.  
  
Ranma slowly turned his head, and the Ninja master realized with alarm that the young man's left hand was glowing with a dark red aura.  
  
"I said: DRAGON FIST!!" Ranma stood as he twisted around and thrust his punch forward.  
  
Matsute quickly pulled himself out of punching range, leaping back more than double Ranma's arm length.  
  
And was thus blasted dead-on from the ki burst, which extended well beyond Ranma's knuckles to ravage the surrounding Earth with angry flames.  
  
The Ninja trainees watched with wide, disbelieving eyes as their master was thrown violently backwards, trailing wisps of smoke and gusts of flame.  
  
*Thump!* They all winced as the elderly man hit the ground and skidded to a stop, leaving a short trail of ash on the ground behind him.  
  
Ranma got up, dusted off his left arm, then smiled at the group of Ninja with his hands on his hips. "Lesson five: Never assume that you know your enemy's limitations! Ancient proverb says: 'Press your attack, before they strike back!'" He grinned as he held up his index finger, as if making a point.  
  
*Whack!* *Thud!* Then the pigtailed warrior fell to the ground unconscious, having been bludgeoned from behind by Natalie.  
  
"Hey! You cheap punk!" K shouted angrily.  
  
"Ninja don't really entertain such concepts as 'cheapness'," David said reasonably. Then he got unsteadily to his feet. "Hun, Chang, you two pick up Master Matsute and bring him back to the village. We're leaving."  
  
K blinked. "What? What about us?!" He asked, jabbing a wing at his insensate companion. "If you just leave him like that, he's completely vulnerable to zombies!"  
  
Kim stared down at the metadragon disdainfully. "And how is that our problem?"  
  
K glared harshly at the Korean Ninja. "If something happens to my friend because you left him out here, I'm going to do some terrible things to you..."  
  
The trainee made a snorking sound as he choked back a laugh. Then he dropped down into a sitting position, balancing on the balls of his feet, and drew a dagger, which he held right in front of the tiny dragon. "Oh? And what are you going to do to me, lizard?"  
  
*Chongk!* Kim blinked in surprise as K bit the blade of his dagger right off, and then turned it in his mouth, so that the dagger point was pointing wherever his beak was.  
  
"Ptoo!" *Thack!*  
  
"EEEEYOOOOOOW!!"  
  
The rest of the Ninja trainees, preparing to leave, watched in great interest and some disgust as K spat the dagger blade right into Kim's foot, causing the Korean to jump around on one foot while he tried to extract the weapon.  
  
It wasn't long before he managed to do so, and he glared hatefully at the metal-plated dragon as he gingerly put his foot back on the ground. "You little son of a-"  
  
"Kim!" David shouted irritably. "Stop digging yourself into another hole and carry the stranger back to the village!"  
  
"What?!" The Korean protested. "Why?! Ow!! Stop biting my foot, you little-"  
  
Fighting the urge not to laugh at watching Kim being harrassed by a creature a tenth his size, Natalie helped David to stand up, and pulled one of his arms over her shoulder. "Are you sure it's wise to bring him with us?" She asked.  
  
The American shrugged his shoulders as best he could, trying to look nonchalant with his body pressed against the shapely Natalie. "I have to agree with the dragon; we can't just leave him out for the zombies. And Master may wish to have words with the one who defeated him." Then he smirked. "And perhaps this will finally get Kim to think twice before he opens his big mouth."  
  
Natalie snorted, watching the Korean start to drag Ranma along the ground by the legs, only to have K bite his leg. "Not bloody likely." Then her gaze softened, and she shuddered slightly as she stared at the insensate wanderer. "Still... I have a bad feeling about this..."  
  
____________________________________________________________________________________  
  
{"All of them? Dead? It's not possible!"} The ogre growled, slamming his fist on the steel table.  
  
The vicoid clicked its mandibles rapidly in distress, then dropped the large, bloody load it was carrying on its shoulder.  
  
*Whump* The body of a large, muscular man in the shredded remains of a trench coat was dropped unceremoniously onto the floor, whereupon he immediately began generating a puddle of blood atop the concrete floor.  
  
{"Yes. All of them except Ta'arn and me. He came out of nowhere! Destroyed everyone!"} The vicoid insisted angrily, kicking the humanoid on the floor.  
  
A second ogre, who was noticeably missing an arm, raised his remaining hand, which gripped a large broadsword around the sheath.  
  
{"We no lie, boss! Human thing move too fast, cut too strong! And have big sword, too!"} He dropped the blade onto the massive steel table and then gestured to the stump of his right arm, as if trying to convince his leader that the sword he had carried like a human would grip a pencil was a great deal larger than it appeared.  
  
The lead ogre stared critically at the sword.  
  
{"Don't touch the handle,"} the vicoid hissed, {"if you touch the grip, and not the sheath, it releases some sort of lightning shock. This thing had no trouble wielding it, so he must be immune to the effect or something."}  
  
The ogre at the table frowned at the sword, then leaned over to stare at the blood-soaked body that was lying on the floor of his raider group's base settlement.  
  
His group of raiders, like many other groups of organized demonic bandits, were escaped creatures that had managed to flee near the tail end of the Death March without being vaporized by the strengthened human armies. Such creatures usually made much better raiders than free-born, wandering beasts, in the sense that they usually possessed the rationale and discipline not to kill and eat each other until they actually got hungry.  
  
The group had settled in what used to be a bunker in the jungle wasteland of North Korea, and had remained there during the final years of the war as the humans struggled to try and gain some sort of foothold on the land they had lost during the conflict. They had been successful, and had grown strong and reliable over time, which was a rare thing for demons of their caliber.  
  
So having the his two remaining men carry in a bloody corpse and declare the rest of the lot dead was the sort of thing that seemed beyond possibility, like having one's entire world crumble right in front of him. {"What... What happened?"}  
  
The ogre underling shrugged helplessly. {"Not know what say. Human-looking thing come, shout at us about 'Carrot'-"}  
  
{"Kharak,"} the vicoid corrected immediately, {"apparently this... thing was associated with the Third Brotherhood somehow."}  
  
The boss, however, was staring at his subordinate ogre. {"How did you understand him?"}  
  
{"He spoke perfect Gaerieth, oddly enough,"} the vicoid mused.  
  
{"So then he just start cut up people! Throw black lightning! Explode Granor! Everything he touch explode in blood or black fire!"} The ogre was shuddering mightily by the end of his report.  
  
The vicoid picked up where his companion left off. {"Eventually though, the fool fought deeper into the quarry where we were feeding and hit a bad wall; tons of boulders and old equipment fell right on top of him. He actually managed to dig himself part-way out, but me and Ta'arn were waiting and beat him to death with boulders before he could get his bearings."}  
  
The boss ogre narrowed his eyes. {"Beat him to death."}  
  
The vicoid cocked its head to one side, as its bug-like eyes themselves weren't capable of expressing confusion. {"Yes... is that a problem?"}  
  
*Pap*  
  
All three creatures jerked back as a wet glove slapped onto the edge of the table and took hold.  
  
{"Don't any of you nitwits know how to take a pulse?"} Rayden mumbled dangerously, slowly pulling himself to his feet, thin streams of blood still leaking down his trench coat.  
  
The vicoid screeched incoherently, and immediately drew a shortsword and stabbed down into the back of the demon hunter's neck, where it sunk nearly an inch before it could pierce no further.  
  
Rayden merely growled and threw an arm back, grasping the insecticoid warrior by the front of its head.  
  
*Sk-Krack!*  
  
Rising to his feet, the lead ogre swallowed nervously as he watched one of his two remaining men get his skull snapped clean off of his neck. {"Wh-Why are you here?! What do you want?!"} He shouted.  
  
Behind him, Ta'arn back fearfully into a corner, cradling the still-bleeding stump of his right arm. {"Please! No kill! NO KILL!!"}  
  
Rayden stood up fully and wobbled slightly, as if in a daze. Then he reached a hand behind him and yanked the short sword out of his neck.  
  
{"No mercy... No mercy for your kind..."} He whispered. Every pore in his body screeched in agony; every muscle screamed for submission. His coat was in shreds, and his shoulders and parts of his arms had abrasions that dug down to his bare muscle. His head was a mess of large, ragged cuts, and hideous globs of mixed bodily fluids oozed from deep puncture wounds in his chest and stomach.  
  
Very slowly, he smiled. {"I am here to fight. To kill. To feed my blade with the life of you and your pathetic little band."}  
  
{"I can pay you,"} the boss offered, backing up toward one of the war hammers on the sparsely decorated wall. {"Just leave, and I can give you whatever riches you want!"}  
  
Rayden coughed, and then he spat a mess of blood onto the steel table. {"You disgust me. Begging for your life in front of a wounded foe. I despise nothing more than a WEAKLING, MARAUDING AS A TITAN!"} To emphasize his anger he slammed a fist onto the steel table, causing the legs to instantly buckle, and the table body to fall down on one side.  
  
Consequently, Rayden's enchanted broadsword slid down the length of the table and landed at the demon hunter's feet.  
  
With a practiced motion, he struck the handle of the weapon with his foot, and then snatched the sheathed body as it bounced up.  
  
{"Come on, you worthless dogs. Spend your last moments fighting. Die like warriors, and not like cattle! Oblivion awaits!"}  
  
*K-SHNG!*  
  
____________________________________________________________________________________  
  
Ranma had learned, through the experience of being captured several times, that it wasn't a good idea to simply snap open your eyes and gape when the first thing you felt upon regaining consciousness was a type of dull agony usually associated with people who had been run down in traffic. It could lead to all sorts of bad things happening, since most of the time when you felt that way, it was because the people that held you in custody had done something terrible to you to make you feel that way in the first place. As soon as you were conscious again, you were once again a threat, as well as a possible candidate for torture. Really bad stuff.  
  
Thus, he immediately began to fight the pain-filled haze that clouded his mind, while at the same time resisting any urge to make various pain-related noises, or moving in a suspicious manner.  
  
'Okay... first thing to do... organize thoughts... last thing I remember... fighting a Ninja... I was standing victorious over that little old guy... then the next moment...'  
  
"Son of a goblin snuck up on me!!" He shouted, jerking upright in his cot.  
  
It hadn't worked any of the other times he had been taken prisoner, either.  
  
Natalie, who was about to apply a wet compress to his head, blinked rapidly in surprise. "I-I'm s-s-sorry!"  
  
Ranma stood still for a moment, not looking at the young woman next to him. Then he frowned.  
  
"Ancient proverb... something about pimps?"  
  
Natalie sweatdropped heavily.  
  
Shaking his head in an attempt to get his bizarre post-knockout memories in order, he turned toward the girl tending to him. "You're one of the Ninja people. So why are you fixing me up instead of cutting me up?"  
  
The Ninja girl smiled softly. "Please, don't be like that. We had a misunderstanding back there in the dead zone, but then, that area tends to make people a little tense. You obviously had no harmful intentions when you met us." Her smile grew bigger. "Also, we all agree that if Kim hadn't opened his fat mouth, then there wouldn't have been any fight. This isn't the first time that the idiot has gotten himself into trouble, and ended up dragging several others into it as a result."  
  
"Ah," Ranma muttered. "So you didn't leave me out there to be zombie food. How long was I out?"  
  
Natalie frowned. "Two and a half hours. You should really lie down. Your injuries... are..."  
  
Ranma stood up straight and then leaned backward, stretching out the kinks in his body in preparation to leave. Wincing, he immediately straightened up again, and noted two important things: 1) The girl had a point; his body was in pretty bad shape, and 2) he was buck naked.  
  
"Meep!" He immediately fell back into the cot and yanked a sheet over his lap, blushing.  
  
The young woman giggled. "Oh, calm down. I was the one who undressed you, so it's nothing I haven't seen before."  
  
Ranma twitched, and was about to say something rather scathing about that, when he realized that his right hand was still covered by his mysterious gauntlet when everything else had been stripped off of him. "Why didn't you take the glove off?"  
  
Natalie frowned. "We couldn't. I even got David and Hung in here to help, but it wouldn't come off no matter what we tried. We eventually decided that we couldn't possibly remove the gauntlet without removing your arm with it, so we just left it on."  
  
Ranma raised an eyebrow, then stared hard at the artifact.  
  
Then, grabbing it around the wrist armlet, he pulled it off of his right hand. It provided slightly more resistance than a normal heavy glove would, but it came off easily enough, and Ranma tossed it on a medical table before examining his right hand.  
  
Natalie blinked. "Oh! Is there some sort of hidden latch on the wrist?"  
  
Ranma shrugged. "It's just weird, is all." Lowering his hand, he turned toward the Ninja girl. "So, can I get my clothes and what's left of my gear? I was sort of heading down into South Korea..."  
  
"Oh, but you are in South Korea!" Natalie explained. "The Shisou Ninja clan is based in the urban ruins of Seoul. Many of the survivors built towns in the ruins, and they were joined by many refugees from Japan."  
  
He blinked. "Ah. That would explain what a Ninja clan is doing here."  
  
Natalie nodded. "Yes. Our master, Matsute, is one of the last remaining true Ninja, trained in the ancient arts for use as an assassin for the prime minister of Japan, before the war. When Tokyo renovated and Japan rose once again as an empire, Master Matsute fled to Korea to avoid being forced into service with the new government, which is embroiled in superficial power struggles with internal factions all the time."  
  
Ranma scratched his head thoughtfully. Last he heard the New Japanese Empire was consumed with taking back the land that had been ravaged in the war and lost to wild demons. But then, it had been quite a while since he'd visited his homeland, and he'd never had much of an understanding of politics.  
  
"When Master Matsute arrived here, he set up this school in the hopes of teaching humans skills that could help them defend themselves and others in this day and age where a gun can't always do the job."  
  
Ranma nodded his head. He could certainly appreciate that. "Okay then. Sorry about beating up the guy then. And your friends."  
  
"Oh, it no trouble at all," said an old, jovial voice in broken Japanese, "it long while since been hit like that, you know. Was good fight."  
  
Ranma turned his head, and watched as Matsute entered the room, with K nestled in his arms. The old man had gauze bandages wrapped around his head and arms, but overall seemed to be in less pain than he was.  
  
"How you feeling, Ranma?" K asked, looking quite content resting on the aging master's arm.  
  
"Good enough, I guess." Ranma glanced at Natalie, then pulled his sheets a little closer to himself. "Though I could really use my clothes right about now."  
  
"That come later," Matsute insisted, obviously unconcerned with Natalie's presence. "You friend K explain many thing to me. I very impressed." He smiled. "It been very long time since I lose fight. You show good strategy, inner strength, determination and great will. I want teach you, and take you on as student here."  
  
K snorted. "I tried explaining that you're a fighter, not an assassin, but he wouldn't-"  
  
"So when do we start?!" Ranma shouted enthusiastically, jumping up (while making sure to hang onto his sheet).  
  
*Thud!*  
  
Ignoring the facefaulting metadragon, Matsute nodded. "We begin tomorrow. You do special exercise, and learn technique to bolster fighting ability, not just sneak around, yes?"  
  
Ranma nodded, grinning. "Right. I wanna learn that multi-form trick, too! Gimme something I can do some damage with!"  
  
"Very good, very good. It night now, and you still injured, so you have question before you go to bed?"  
  
The newly inducted Ninja trainee nodded seriously. "Yes Master, just one."  
  
Natalie and K leaned forward slightly in curiosity.  
  
"If you were born and raised in Japan, how come you talk like that?"  
  
*Thud!* *Crash!* The female Ninja and the male dragon both fell to the floor face-first.  
  
Matsute, oddly enough, answered the question seriously. "It for effect. Make seem much wiser and more experienced. Nobody know why."  
  
"Ah," Ranma mumbled contemplatively. "Whatever. What do I do now?"  
  
Matsute snapped his fingers. "Tad!"  
  
Ranma blinked, and Natalie groaned.  
  
After a few moments, a young man only a few years younger than Ranma came crawling into the room silently, like the way a Ninja would crawl across a ceiling. Except that in this case, he was crawling on the floor.  
  
"Tad! Get up!" The Ninja master ordered, snapping his fingers again.  
  
Nodding sharply, the trainee leapt up and flipped his body around, similar to the way a Ninja would leap from the ceiling onto the floor.  
  
*Crash!* And fell onto his head, due to a little restrictive hitch known as "gravity".  
  
"This is Tad," Matsute informed Ranma, pointing to the heap on the floor. "We train him wrong, as a joke."  
  
The mentally unfit Ninja stood up, and then stared critically at Ranma. "You're one of them, aren't you?!"  
  
Ranma blinked. "Who?"  
  
Tad jumped back, looking shocked. "What?!"  
  
"Huh?" Ranma responded.  
  
"GYAAAA!!" *Wham!* Tad, apparently horrified by the exchange, turned and attempted to flee to safety, an effort that was significantly impeded by the wall.  
  
"Well, he's got lotsa character, doesn't he?" K muttered, sitting down at Ranma's feet.  
  
"Yes, all of it bad," Natalie muttered.  
  
"That not matter now," Matsute explained to Ranma. "Shisou clan base is stationed in abandoned office building, and only have two level available for housing students. Each room set up for two people." The aging master raised two fingers. "At present, only two people no have roommate, and have rooms to self. Natalie, because she only female trainee, and Tad, because he idiot loon and everyone hate him. You have choice of roommate."  
  
Ranma blinked in surprise. "Wait, so I can either room with her," he pointed to Natalie, who flushed slightly, "or him?" he pointed to Tad, who was busy pulling splinters out of his forehead.  
  
Matsute nodded, pointing to the female Ninja. "Natalie senior pupil, very dedicated to perfection of martial arts, practices full-body massage technique as hobby, and prone to spontaneous episode of nymphomania."  
  
The busty young woman blushed harder, but didn't attempt to deny the description.  
  
Matsute then pointed at Tad, who had finished plucking all the splinters and was now poking the wall, as if looking for weaknesses that would allow him to bypass the entirely visible doorway standing two feet to his right. "Tad hobby is speaking with invisible leprechauns. He also keep dead spider as pet. Would list Tad's medicinally recognized mental illnesses, but only have hour and half before have to teach class."  
  
Ranma frowned. Then he stared at Natalie, who smiled and shrugged. Then he turned to stare at Tad, who was looking at K and licking his lips.  
  
Then the pigtailed warrior smirked. "Oh... I get it... okay..." then he walked up to Tad and threw an arm over his shoulder. "Well, I guess we're roomies then!"  
  
Matsute stared at Ranma like he was as insane as his new roommate. So did K and Natalie, for that matter. "You is serious?"  
  
Ranma chuckled. "Sure. I know what this is. You give me a seemingly obvious choice as a test to measure my devotion to the art and my ability to resist temptation, right?"  
  
Matsute raised an eyebrow. "Ah... sure. What you say. Whatever."  
  
K looked up at Natalie. "Guess it's you and me, babe."  
  
Ranma blinked. "What? You're not staying with me?"  
  
"Hell no!" K insisted, jabbing a wing at Tad. "I think that screwball wants to eat me!"  
  
Looking down at his new roommate, and taking careful note of the manner in which Tad scraped a fork and knife together while staring intently at the metadragon, Ranma had to admit that K had a point.  
  
Natalie sighed and scooped the dragon up. "Come on, little guy. I don't think I can massage something without actual skin, but it couldn't hurt to try."  
  
As the young woman left the makeshift infirmary, Ranma began to wonder if he had made a mistake.  
  
"Well then," Matsute said, clapping his knees, "you should get to bed now, I must teach class soon. I see you tomorrow, after you get sleep. Or after Tad trick you into empty elevator shaft. Good night."  
  
The Ninjitsu master opened the door to the hall, and then turned back toward Ranma. "Ancient proverb say: 'A good companion make good company.'"  
  
Ranma took some time to consider this, purely by the virtue that it was the first "ancient proverb" Matsute had mentioned that didn't sound entirely idiotic. "So... are you saying I'm in good company?"  
  
"I saying you stupid!" The Ninja master shouted, before rushing out and slamming the door behind him.  
  
Now alone with Tad, Ranma frowned and scratched his head. "You ever have one of those ideas that you think is really clever and noble, that righteously resists lust and greed, but completely backfires on you?"  
  
Tad nodded seriously. "Yeah, just once. Turns out I wasn't really pregnant, though."  
  
Ranma's left eye twitched. 'This doesn't bode well for the rest of my stay here...'  
  
____________________________________________________________________________________  
  
Doppler stretched his upper pair of arms as he stood upon the ledge overlooking the demonic horde below.  
  
{"Now remember, you'll only have a short time to complete your task. Haste is key,"} Doppler chided, using one of his lower arms to shake a finger at the juga commander before him.  
  
Jugas were large, powerful demons that resembled armored robots more than biological creatures. Mounted on two thick, taloned legs that tapered into a much wider torso, most jugas stood at least ten feet high without their wings spread. Their heads were crested helmets with small eye holes and a small, unobtrusive jaw with sharp teeth, and their arms were massive, ending in large, scythe-like claws. Their entire bodies were covered with thick, spiky overlaying scales that were notorious for being impervious to heat, electricity, radiation, and most forms of magic, but were somewhat vulnerable to piercing weapons (such as vehicle-based machine guns). They also possessed large, plated wings that were usually retracted into the juga's back, but could be spread for limited flight. They were savage and proud demons, with no affinity for magic and a level of strength that exceeded expectations for something of their size.  
  
This particular juga held the unusual position of being leader of a rescue operation. Demons and their bestial underlings were not famous for their loyalty or devotion; they'd follow and listen to just about anyone, so long as they had gold and food, but for such creatures to actually attempt to liberate another spoke of a kind of bond one rarely saw outside of the Dark Brotherhoods.  
  
The juga commander nodded toward Doppler. {"Your assistance is greatly appreciated, Lord Thaeramon! Though your... friendship... with these vile humans is somewhat marring of your reputation, I'm certain our Lord Yaermon will see to it that you are properly rewarded for your help. Though I must criticize how long it took you to lend your aid."}  
  
Doppler shrugged helplessly as he finished stretching, adopting a more casual pose. {"There's not much I can say about that; attacking a critical, heavily defended facility deep in the heart of the most powerful nation in the realm isn't the sort of proposition that just begs to be taken up."}  
  
The juga snorted, but said nothing as he approached the edge of the cliff.  
  
Once he was out of earshot, Doppler turned toward Tio, who was standing patiently nearby. "I really do hate this whole plan... it's far too direct for my liking."  
  
Tio raised an eyebrow. "Oh? Then why do you support it still?"  
  
Doppler bit his lip and scratched his head. "Amazingly enough, I really couldn't think of anything better than this. It's why I hate fighting Americans."  
  
"Too clever?" The hybrid devil offered.  
  
"Too greedy and violent," Doppler explained, "it compensates almost entirely for any lack of intelligence. Did I ever tell you about the dig in New Zealand?"  
  
Tio, now VERY interested, shook his head.  
  
The veirheelu mage sighed and massaged his forehead. "A complete disaster. A crevax mage was using golems to dig up an artifact of unusual power deep in the mountains, so I got Junnral to contact the United States and ask for assistance with an extermination raid, since it was trying to control that area to prevent incursions into the South Pacific. Junnral sent in a squad of vicoids and a few dragoons, and an American base promised some 'fire support'. I myself was planning to have him place some teleportation runestones and transport anything of value to a safe location once the mage was destroyed."  
  
Tio smirked. "And?"  
  
"They sent a squadron of bombers and blasted the entire area to rubble, destroying Junnral and the crevax." Then Doppler turned away bitterly. "What's worse, when I arrived there a day later to look for what the mage was excavating, some corporation named 'Halliburton' had already stripped the area of everything of value and was shipping it away under heavy guard."  
  
Tio snorted, trying to restrain outright laughter. "What is the world coming to, when men partake of the wisdom of demons? It's almost enough to make you want to admire the little wretches."  
  
Doppler smiled despite himself. "Oh, I admire them very much! You have to think highly of any race that's so devoted to warfare, despite being so ill-suited for it."  
  
A ways past the two chatting demons, the juga commander was wrapping up his inspirational speech to his small army below. It was a diverse group, consisting of most every race that had settled on Earth that held blatantly evil tendencies, and even a few of those races that didn't, such as evon and lycanthropes.  
  
{"You all remember,"} The juga bellowed down over the cliff, {"how those pathetic rats in the European union cowered before the onslaught of the Three Legions!! You all remember who laid waste to the resistance in the East, and thwarted the American war machines again and again!!"}  
  
The demonic commander gripped his claws into a fist before him. {"Even now, with our great Lord Demetrius in their grasp, STILL they cannot destroy him!! For five cycles of the moon, they've held him, and locked him in their cell, attempting his execution, and STILL he lives on, invincible, immortal, indestructible!! He has defied the humans and succeeded, even as the remains of his army slowly rots upon the fields of the eastern continent!!"}  
  
Great cheers, mostly in the forms of unintelligible grunts and growls, came from the crowd below, and the demon commander lowered his claw.  
  
{"We go now, into the HEART of the human slime, to retrieve our master!! And, by our strength, we will see him given his proper throne, as RULER OF THIS MISERABLE SPHERE!!"}  
  
Doppler watched impassively as the army below erupted into chaotic cheering, working itself into a furious mob.  
  
"It's like watching a bull give a speech to the cows before he charges headfirst into an electric fence. As much as I belittle the humans, it's no wonder we lost the war."  
  
Tio grinned at his master's evaluation. "He is a fool, but at least he will serve some purpose before he dies. Not all of his kind are so lucky."  
  
The pair sobered up and remained silent as the juga commander approached.  
  
{"Lord Thaeramon, are you ready?"}  
  
Doppler nodded. {"You have placed the talismans as instructed?"}  
  
The juga nodded, so Doppler began making several complex gestures with all four hands.  
  
*Ssssssssh* Pure blackness somehow possessing the consistency of liquid seeped up from the ground and grasped Doppler and Tio, engulfing both their forms in thick, murky darkness. After a moment, archaic runes etched themselves into the shadowy substance, and it solidified into full-body armor.  
  
The juga stared oddly at them. {"What is this?"}  
  
{"Simply a protective spell, friend,"} Doppler explained while he began casting the teleportation spell. {"Not all of us possess such remarkable natural protections as you, and this particular spell has the dual advantage of making us indistinguishable. I must maintain my 'marred reputation' for getting along with the humans, after all."}  
  
The juga again snorted disdainfully, then stalked over to the radius of the teleportation circle.  
  
Doppler smirked at the commander's back. 'So it begins, little pawn. And for you... so it ends, as well...'  
  
____________________________________________________________________________________  
  
Area 64, American military base, facility codename: Gallows. Location: Arizona, near the city of Phoenix. Primary function: the official destruction and disposal of high-energy units.  
  
"Right this way, Colonel," instructed the captain of the guards to a military official, leading him toward the heavy reinforced doors.  
  
Stopping at the control panel next to the entry vault, the captain entered a passcode and then put his eye up to an optical scanner. Within moments heavy gears on each side of the vault doors began to slowly open the heavy barriers, allowing entry to the first level of the facility.  
  
The Colonel noted the shiny, rust-colored sheen on the vault doors, and nodded at it. "Adamantite?"  
  
The captain bit his lip. "Adamantite plating. Just added a few weeks ago. They're tossing out mithril alloys these days as fast as they can come up with them."  
  
The doors finished opening, and the captain led the military officer inside the facility.  
  
"As you were probably told prior to coming here, Gallows used to be a magic technology research facility designed for high-energy experimentation and containment. It was here that the nova bomb was developed." The captain gestured around at the first floor's equipment, which was mostly security devices and meters measuring activity below.  
  
The Colonel nodded. "And now it's being used as a big execution facility for that Yaermon freak." The officer shook his head. "Mind telling me how and why that thing is still alive?"  
  
The captain shrugged. "There is no 'why' really, just the 'how'. This fellow's a psilor, see, and they have this trick where they assume a state of pure energy." He stopped at another panel in front of the elevator, typed in a different code, and once again put his face up to the optical scanner. "In this state, these things can do all sorts of things: electrocute people, fire energy, go through walls and such. And supposedly, they can't be killed like that, either."  
  
The elevator doors opened, and the Colonel and his escort stepped inside.  
  
"Thing is, at least according to the evon we have helping us in our Military Research divisions, they can't hold that state for very long, because they bleed energy like crazy, and in that state, energy is all they are. This has been confirmed by our own forces, who've taken down a number of the freaks on the field. Try and stay away for forty seconds or so, and they'll turn solid again, and from there you just put enough holes in 'em."  
  
The captain sighed. "The trick is, this thing's been holding his form for months, since a while before we even captured him! We've figured out ways to contain him, to sedate him, to move him, and restrain him, but we can't bloody KILL the freak! So we converted the third floor of Area 64 into a big electric pod, and trapped him inside. Basically we're just waiting for him to get tired and drop his energy form; the second he goes fleshy, he's fried."  
  
The Colonel shook his head. "I remember a time when radiation was the strangest thing that war could unleash. Now we have these damn monsters coming out of magic gateways and crap..." He sighed. "What happened to the good old days, when men all fought and killed each other over who's religion was the best?"  
  
The captain smirked and shrugged. "Seems a bit petty nowadays, sir."  
  
"You're right... so why, exactly, am I here?"  
  
The captain sobered immediately. "At the President's direct request, we are to have a strong and fully capable military presence at the base and in the facility at all times until the prisoner is finally silenced, sir! Up until yesterday, Colonel Tarlock was in command, but he has been recalled to a more active role in assisting a new expeditionary force!"  
  
The Colonel pursed his lips. "Was he a human from some backwards third-world country, or are you talking about THAT Colonel Tarlock?"  
  
The captain looked hesitant for a moment. "... THAT Colonel Tarlock, sir. The dragon."  
  
The officer nodded slightly. "I see... well, whatever. So long as he's on our side, I suppose."  
  
*Ch-Chung!* The elevator reached the third floor below ground, and the doors slowly opened.  
  
"Well... here he is, Colonel..." The captain mumbled.  
  
The officer nodded slowly as he stepped forward, his eyes locked on the imposing enclosure ahead.  
  
Covering a vast majority of the room was a massive, transparent enclosure that had huge ribbons of electricity pulsing through it at seemingly random intervals. Sitting in the middle of the electric storm was a single cylindrical energy-based enclosure that glowed a soft yellow, turning red when the bolts of deadly energy pierced through it.  
  
In the middle of the tube, floated Demetrius.  
  
He wasn't a particularly large or frightening creature; certainly not as intimidating as half the monsters one could find in the expeditionary logs nowadays, but even floating there, trapped, possibly moments away from being destroyed, he managed to exude a sense of power and subtle might.  
  
Demetrius was about seven feet tall, and in his energy state, his body glowed a pulsing, flowing mix of blue and white ambient energy. The energy formed a large, humanoid-shaped body that lacked any defining characteristics other than size; it lacked any muscle definition or genitals, had no mouth or nose, had feet and hands that were simply solid pads rather than segmented manipulators, and its eyes were simply empty black slits, slots of void in the midst of a body of roiling power. Oddly enough, his energy form did have hair, or at least, a strangely formed mass of energy that resembled hair; a spiky cascade that started above the forehead and swept back down beyond the shoulders, tapering off to several points ending mid-back.  
  
"Well, damn... what's his killable form look like?" The Colonel asked, turning back to the guard.  
  
The captain scratched his head. "I haven't the slightest. Hell, the day I see it will be the day this fellow gets fried by enough amperage to power Vegas for a week. I heard he's supposed to look pretty human-like, though."  
  
The officer shook his head. "Right... what's the security like? Chances of this freak getting loose?"  
  
The captain snorted. "Slim to none. See those things that keep shooting lightning bolts in there, and the generator that keeps that force field up? Can't be turned off."  
  
The Colonel raised an eyebrow. "They can't?"  
  
The captain smiled. "Nope. They said there were a bunch of concerns about parasites or mind-control spells getting into guards and people and releasing this fellow. President didn't want that, so he ordered everything to be built without an off switch. There's no way to turn off the juice without taking down the main plants down in the city or the underground power lines, plus the back-up generator underground. And there's no way to turn off these big, armored machines without destroying or dismantling them, and we don't have the equipment on hand in the facility to do either. The only way we figure somebody could get this bastard out is direct assault, and we've got enough guns in the military base nearby to ensure that it won't happen."  
  
The military officer took a long look around the complex, and at the various armed guards and scientific personnel. "Gotta hand it to Bush. When he decides to execute somebody, he doesn't screw around."  
  
The captain chuckled. "No, he doesn't. Welcome to the Gallows, sir!"  
  
____________________________________________________________________________________  
  
*SHOOOOOOoooooooo...* Huge waves of energy flowed in seemingly random flows, washing over each other in a maelstrom of chaotic light. All around the waves, runes that had been etched into the surrounding stones glowed brightly as the energy they stored was suddenly called into use, teleporting a teeming mass of life (and in a few specific cases, unlife) within its boundaries.  
  
One by one, clouds of blue energy coalesced into tangible forms, and the creatures gathered in the northern regions of China appeared at once, ready for battle, in the desert regions of Arizona.  
  
Once the effect faded completely, the juga commander grinned and jabbed a claw forward. {"Just as Thaeramon said! Less than half an hour's march to the facility, and our lords freedom! MARCH!!"}  
  
A series of howls and screeches followed the juga's command, and the small demonic horde stomped forward along the sands, readying their various weapons.  
  
They were a well-armed group, possessing not only traditional inter-realms weapons that carried enchantments to allow them to compete, on some levels, with common guns, but also a fair number of actual guns, which were more often than not dug up from the charred battlefields of the East, or purchased from those who made it their business to do such digging. Demons were not the most machine-friendly creatures out there, so several of the weapons were in poor repair, but on the whole, this was an army that could hold its own...  
  
Were it anywhere but in the United States of America itself.  
  
An arachida warrior spotted a glimmer out of one of the many eyes that decorated its skull, and immediately jerked its head to the side.  
  
{"Something's over there! Something in the air!"}  
  
Several heads (and various equivalent body parts) turned, and low chanting could be heard from within the horde.  
  
*Voosh!* *Woosh!* *Shrak!* Several energy bolts flew out in the general direction that the spider-descended demon was pointing, and one lightning bolt lashed out blindly, striking something that was invisible to the naked eye.  
  
Electricity curled around a large, airborne object, and there was a short but sharp explosion as a magitek cloaking device overloaded. Within moments the field that was hiding the American Wraith V-77 gunship dissipated, leaving the rotorless chopper exposed to the demon's weapons.  
  
Desperately the pilot attempted to bring the craft around and out of the danger zone, but to no avail as bullets, enchanted bolts, and magical blasts of varying composition all rained down upon his craft.  
  
*Thwoom!* One firebolt in particular struck the back end of the Wraith, and the helicopter chassis went into a tailspin right before a particularly large spike of magically-propelled ice streaked toward the aircraft.  
  
The demon commander chuckled deeply as the aircraft was torn apart by the hailstorm of icicles, and looked around at the flow of demons that continued marching past him.  
  
{"THIS is the best that 'technology' has to offer?! THIS is what has Thaeramon hiding under a mask of shadows?! Come! Raze this pathetic dump! Consume this filth! CRUSH EVERYTHING!!"} With a feral roar, the juga thrust his hands into the air in triumph.  
  
He kept his hands in the air for a few moments longer than necessary, because he was distracted by the sight of dozens of other Wraith gunships uncloaking.  
  
Unlike the others, these craft dropped their cloaks as functions of arming their weapons, which consisted of two .50 caliber heavy machine guns, two 30 mm. explosive-round Gatling cannons, and one of the more recent conventional weapon innovations of the American army: the light autocannon, which fired a kind of mithril-head ammunition that was commonly described as "the kind that sends dragons back to their holes, whimpering like wounded puppies".  
  
Taking a glance around, the juga noted that the gunships formed a loose ring around his entire army, with a slightly denser knot taking up the rear, where they had slipped in under the cloak. Strange... Doppler hadn't mentioned that the Americans would have this much firepower available on such short notice.  
  
Taking another look around, the juga commander slowly lowered his arms. "Gsh, yall Doppler krsh?" Or, translated, "Hey, where is Doppler?"  
  
The rest of his words were mostly drowned out by heavy gunfire. Which is fine, since most of them were simple curse words anyhow.  
  
____________________________________________________________________________________  
  
Doppler and Tio DID arrive, but they simply arrived at a far more convenient location, defined best as "right outside the facility". Buried talismans glowed with power, and a small teleportation ring opened up right in front of the adamantite gates.  
  
"What the hell?!"  
  
"Open fire!!"  
  
The guards immediately opened up on the two figures in black armor, only to be overcome by a sense of dread as they watched the shadowy mail simply absorb the bullets, and then close back up over the holes that the weapons left.  
  
Tio snapped his hand down and retrieved a chakra, and concentrated briefly before he threw it at the nearest human. The magic runes etched into the side of the bladed ring glowed vibrantly, and as the weapon sliced easily through the closest guard, it immediately changed direction and zipped toward the next one, moving at a speed that the hapless men couldn't hope to track, and immediately reorienting itself on the next living target.  
  
While his bodyguard was removing the human threat, Doppler concentrated on one of the few spells he had managed to develop especially for the task of dealing with humans' technology.  
  
Drawing a circle in the air with one hand and quickly inscribing a rune within it with another, he aimed his remaining two hands at the ground. "Ion purge!" A blue beam of no immediately apparent composition blasted into the ground, striking and spreading across the Earth with no immediate effect.  
  
*Brrrzack!* All at once, a dozen hidden automated turrets, no doubt moments from becoming active, popped out of the ground of their own accord, ribbons of electricity curling around their sensory components.  
  
"Chain lightning!" Doppler shouted, summoning a quick sphere of energy and tossing it.  
  
*Zack!* *Blam!* *Crashk!* *Blam!* *Boom!* One after another, each of the robotic defenses were torn apart by the high-powered lance of energy, which jumped from one turret to another until it finally jumped into the control panel next to the vault doors, where it detonated violently, spreading glass and melted metal onto the hardened desert ground.  
  
*Shnk!* Tio carefully snatched up his chakra in his armored hand as it flew back to him, and gave the weapon a good shake to rid it of the humans' blood before reattaching it to his weapon belt.  
  
Doppler nodded, and began his next series of spells. "Quickly now. We must make haste. After they finish destroying the demons up north, it will only be a matter of minutes until they get here, and they may have actually dispatched something to this facility anyway as a matter of caution. We can't afford to-"  
  
Tio blinked as the spell Doppler was casting petered out right at the moment that it would normally be deployed. "My lord, what's wrong?"  
  
Doppler frowned. "Those... Those WORMS actually shielded the lower levels! I don't believe it! They must literally have wards hanging on the walls down there just to keep impossibly powerful sorcerers from teleporting inside!"  
  
Gitting his teeth, the demon lord began to form two separate spells, aiming toward the vault doors. "No matter... if they wish to take ridiculous precautions against foes they couldn't hope to stand against anyway... Acid lance! Krystallis dominae!!"  
  
A thick green bolt slammed hard into the reddish doors of the vault, and as steam began to pour off of it, a glowing circle appeared under the vault doors.  
  
*K-SHRAAAK!* A huge blade of crystal erupted from the ground and dug hard into the door, utterly tearing the human bodies and unresponsive turrets to shreds in the process.  
  
Smirking, Doppler snapped his fingers.  
  
*KA-BLAAAM!!* The crystal exploded violently, throwing shards of razor-sharp exploding glass in all directions, such that Doppler had to erect a hasty barrier to keep him and his servant safe from the effects (such a spell was of a high enough level that even the shrapnel could cause some damage through the shadow armor).  
  
That smirk died when the dust cleared. The door, though obviously damaged, appeared to be completely intact, with neither the acid nor the crystal having pierced the outer plate.  
  
"How..." Doppler's eye twitched as he stared hard at the disfigured barrier. "That can't be mitrhil! What in Vharrun's name is that?!"  
  
Tio shook his head as he stared at it. It wasn't any metal he'd ever seen. "My lord, perhaps we should-"  
  
*Thack!!* "GYAH!!" The perplexed veirheelu suddenly staggered forward as a high-velocity projectile struck him in the back of the head, and then stood back up straight, gritting his teeth.  
  
Blinking in surprise, Tio watched as a large hole in the shadow armor covering the entry wound writhed in an unusual fashion before it sealed itself up.  
  
Holding out a hand, Doppler growled as a hole in the shadow armor covering his forehead opened up and spat the bullet out, whereupon he grabbed it and held it up for observation. "Mithril tip, with mana disruption charge. A 'mage killer' bullet." He threw the bullet on the ground.  
  
Then he raised his upper arms above his head, and his lower ones pressed together over his chest. Doppler's eyes glowed a bright gold, and a powerful aura began to swirl around him.  
  
"Tio... I grow irritated..." He frowned, and his eyes narrowed. "No... I grow ANGRY."  
  
Then, slowly, a third eye in the middle of his forehead slowly opened, its iris a furious swirl of red and black, like lava. His hybrid companion, who knew vaguely what was coming next, opted to back off, behind a rock outcropping, and erect as powerful a barrier around himself as he could.  
  
"Shakrin ta gahrea mon tharamos... place thyself before the judgment of the cosmic balance... feel the darkness fall, the moon, the sun, the endless night upon the barren dawn... let all fall to the might of eternity... and may the souls of the living burn within the flames of oblivion. OMEGA FLARE."  
  
____________________________________________________________________________________  
  
"Heh... never fails... first day on the job..." the Colonel slumped down against the metal wall of the containment level, blood from the wounds on his back leaving a thick streak upon the cold steel.  
  
*Thump* The upper torso of the last of the guards fell heavily upon the floor, blood flowing freely from where his waist used to be.  
  
Doppler stared hard at the officer, and his third eye twitched.  
  
"Gurk!" The Colonel began to choke as some unseen force lifted him off the floor by his neck and held him in the air.  
  
"Please! Stop this! We beg of you!" Several scientists, not having posed any kind of resistance, still remained huddled in the far corner of the facility, staring fearfully at the shadow-cloaked figure of Tio standing over them.  
  
Doppler turned toward them, taking his attention off the last of the military personnel. "Know that you have done nothing wrong, humans. You die today as victims of fate, being in the wrong place, at the wrong time, in a struggle that you have no real place in. If you pray to any gods, offer your prayers now."  
  
He turned back toward the Colonel. "My servant, kill them. But don't enjoy it."  
  
Tio nodded seriously, and drew his angled scimitar. A particularly sharp edge, good for quick kills. "As you wish, Master."  
  
Doppler once again focused on the military officer, striding forward. "Now let's be fair about this. You've caused me some deal of trouble already, and I've expended more energy than I should have. No matter what you do, I'm leaving with Yaermon. Just deactivate whatever's holding him, and I'll make your death completely painless."  
  
"I... c-can't..." the Colonel mumbled, gasping for breath, "no one... can... turn it off..."  
  
Doppler's third eye pulsed.  
  
The demon lord frowned. "Well I'll be damned. You're telling the truth. I honestly thought that was just a rumor to enhance security." Sighing, the demon lord summoned a ball of shadow into his hand and then swiped it miserably at the last of the military personnel.  
  
*SHRAK!* Blood sprayed in a thick fan over the wall, and the Colonel's corpse fell over into three pieces.  
  
"NO!! NOOOO-" *CHNGK!!* Tio's blade cut deep into the wall after it finished passing through the final scientist's neck, and he took a moment to wrench it out of the reinforced metal before he turned once again toward his master.  
  
Slowly, Doppler's third eye closed itself and then sealed itself, such that it was impossible to tell it ever existed. "Tio. Hack the machines apart. One by one, if you need to. And hurry; I can sense them moving troops into the facility." The demon lord knew he could destroy any number of human soldiers that could possibly squeeze into the corridors of the facility, but once they took enough losses, the Americans would undoubtedly began attempting less discriminatory attacks which would be much more difficult to defend against.  
  
"I should not have used so much power all at once," he decided, chiding himself, "anger is the enemy of reason, and reason is the foundation of intellect. Always remember! Intellect turns battles and wins wars!"  
  
Then he looked up at the figure suspended within the containment fields. "And intellect will bring you back from the brink of destruction. Sorry I took so long, Demetrius."  
  
And then, for the first time in weeks, the flickering figure within the cell looked up and spoke. "Thank you for coming at all... Master."  
  
***********************************************************************************  
  
End Chapter 5  
  
And now, here you have it!  
  
38 Easy Steps to Being a Ninja (presented for your entertainment, courtesy of my tireless devotion to Dave Barry)  
  
1) Decide to study martial arts  
  
2) Choose which school of martial arts to train in  
  
3) Choose Ninjitsu, because frankly, it has a longer and more intimidating name than Karate and Judo  
  
4) Find out from some vaguely knowledgable friend that Ninjitsu is practiced by Ninjas  
  
5) Decide that this is absolutely awesome  
  
6) Find a school that teaches Ninjitsu. This is not easy. So we will provide the invaluable information that tells you whether it's easy or not, and then move on to the next step  
  
7) Locate an old man that looks as intimidating as a doorstop  
  
8) Speak to the old man, and inform him that you'd like to learn Ninjitsu. The old man will inform you that he is the Ninjitsu master  
  
9) Forget that you are a novice in the middle of a bloody Ninjitsu school. Laugh at the old man and tell him that he looks weak and brittle  
  
10) Get your ass kicked, hard. You may think it's acceptable to keep getting up despite losing, to prove that you don't give up no matter what, but quite frankly, this is stupid, so just stay down and let your ribs knit  
  
11) Give up, leave the school, and decide to take up a skill more useful and relevant, like mowing lawns  
  
12) Find a dark cave and enter, using one of two methods:  
  
A) Listen to voices that speak in your head, if for no other reason just to get them to shut up (It will not work)  
  
B) Follow some kind of odd or ugly creature into the cave, displaying the type of common sense that retarded lemmings commonly find amusing  
  
13) Move through the cave until you come to some sort of guardian. This will be a huge, ugly creature  
  
14) Soil yourself  
  
15) If you entered the cave through method B, this is either going to be the creature you followed, or a friend of that creature, and you will be unable to move before being swatted away. If you entered the cave through method A, then escape while following the instructions of the voice in your head, which will provide insightful, critical strategic information like "Run!", but fail to warn you to watch your step before you trip over a rock and knock yourself out  
  
16) Wake up. Note that everything is pitch black  
  
17) Open your eyes, you moron  
  
18) Get up and notice that you are now in a room with some sort of artifact, such as a sword or mask, sitting on a glowing pedestal in the middle of the cave  
  
19) Attempt to leave immediately, ignoring the protest of the voice in your head or curiosity, and forgetting about the guardian outside the room  
  
20) Repeat steps 13-19 as needed for you to realize that you're doomed  
  
21) Bang your head on a stalactite  
  
22) Wonder if you're banging your head on the rock spikes that point up, or the ones that point down, forgetting which was the stalactite and which was the stalagmite  
  
23) Ponder this point for far longer than would seem necessary. If the guardian appears and began to point impatiently to his watch, it may be wise to hurry this process with a dictionary, or an internet search  
  
24) Resign yourself to the inevitable, and pick up the Goddamn artifact, you wuss  
  
25) Become overwhelmed with power, and feel a shuddering energy rush through your body  
  
26) Finish passing gas, and then realize that the artifact hasn't done anything  
  
27) Just when you decide that it's shiny enough to trade for a Snicker's bar, notice that there's an incription on it  
  
28) DON'T READ IT OUT LOUD!  
  
29) Seriously  
  
30) Don't!  
  
31) I told you not to-! Oh, hell...  
  
32) Feel a different kind of energy rush through you, and undergo a transformation which, if you're male, will NOT result in a miniskirt, much to Josh Temple's disappointment  
  
33) You're now a Ninja, based on the fact that you vaguely look like one after being transformed  
  
34) Attempt to leave the cave  
  
35) Bang your foot on whichever one of those spikes stick upward, and yell "Goddamn... spike!"  
  
36) Once again become consumed with the exact word for that particular geological formation  
  
37) Notice that the cave guardian is back. You forgot about him, didn't you?  
  
38) Repeat steps 13-17 


	6. Shadows Beckon, Lizards Roar

Species: Draconis leionitus  
Common name: Dragon  
Class: Draconian  
Subspecies: Several unknown major varieties, primarily differentiated by color and overall physical biology - different varieties of dragon may have vastly different bodily structures, and recent studies suggest that this is a result of an enhanced mana influence upon key gene structures - within each dragon type lies an informal caste system, further structuring the genetic hierarchy; dragons of the same type with different strengths or traits are immediately differentiated socially and behaviorally. In addition, there are several species of "non-dragons" that share the same DNA but lack certain mana-based sensitivities that apparently influence their level of intelligence. These are called psuedo dragons, and are recognized as a seperate species.  
Sentience & Intelligence: Dragons are very intelligent, easily approaching and sometimes surpassing that of humans. Dragons show enhanced perception and comprehensive skills, though their ability for mathematics and any associated science has been rated, in all studies that have thusfar been conducted, as well below the human average. This has led researchers to theorize that dragons have an advanced understanding of arts, culture, and history, especially where it concerns the arcane or magical, but a severely lacking engineering and scientific capacity, despite their obviously high intelligence.  
Physical biology: Varies widely. All dragons thusfar tested have failed to show a high enough degree of genetic difference between them in their DNA scans to account for the vast difference in their physical forms. Bone structure, limb structure, dermis composition, and organ allocation all vary between different types of dragon. There have also been second-hand reports of dragons that have inorganic carapaces, such as rock, crystal, dead bone tissue, and even metal. One fascinating trait of all "true" dragons, however, is the ability to take on a form that appears human, and possesses few to none of the traits of the base specie. Unfortunately, research in this area has been limited due to a lack of live, willing test subjects, as well as the many ethical conflicts inherent in using live subjects. With the return of Colonel Tarlock to active duty, all live experiments in this area have been suspended until further notice.  
Mana resonance: Very high. Mana levels must be sustained to maintain life force, though the amount of time the host body can be severed from exposure is significant. Dragons show affinity for non-patterned spellcasting and possess some inherent abilities that can only be explained by superior resonance.  
Lifespan: Second-hand information suggests that dragons have no natural lifespan. Maturity varies depending on dragon type, but is more consistent than most other biological factors; the infancy period usually lasts 20-25 years, followed by a period of rapid growth that lasts 10-20 years, usually ending when the immature dragon is half the size of the average adult. At this point the metabolism and hormone levels drop significantly, and the body slowly matures into adulthood over a period of time that varies from type to type more than other stages of growth, ranging from 130-580 years. Second-hand sources suggest that females reach adulthood much later than males consistently across all dragon types.  
Diet: Dragons' diets not only vary according to their type, but also according to each individual's personal taste. Dragons, as a species, have been known to consume just about anything containing significant nutrients or minerals, from rocks to plants to large animals, and even humans (though Tarlock claims we taste terrible).  
Biological anomalies: Besides the vast physical differences between similar gene structures, all dragon tissue tested showed 0 mutation against all known radiation types, suggesting a complete immunity to the harmful and normal effects of radiation. Some dragon types showed a complete immunity to high exposure to energy in the form of heat; these same types showed an inexplicable (relative) sensitivity to heat loss. Unfortunately these other immunities and affinities vary from type to type, and require much more study for any useful conclusions to be drawn.  
Reproductive type: Draconis leonitus reproduces through sex-based meiosis, and consistently lays eggs across all types. It is unknown whether a dragon might conceive or impregnate when undergoing intercourse in its "human" form, and second-hand sources are reluctant to investigate or supply information on this matter.  
Social structure: Second-hand interviews have determined that isolated or lower-ranking castes favor matriarchal polygyny, where the oldest or most powerful females take several mates for selective breeding and often keep watch over the younger females and assign them mates from the available pool of fertile males. Particularly powerful male dragons (in isolated nests) will often break away from this system and establish personal harems, taking females and killing other males that aren't of direct lineage. Dragon civilizations, of what few there are, contain mostly monogamous mating pairs, though polygamy is not uncommon. The caste system within these civilizations is similar to the old medieval system of nobles and knights, with the most powerful dragons, or those from powerful bloodlines, sharing the wealth and respect of their families and commanding lesser dragons as attendant warriors (the role of "peasant" that was quite prevalent in the feudal ages is taken on only by particularly weak or dishonored dragons, of which there are few; dragons usually employ or enslave "lesser" creatures to do labors that they consider below them). Those dragons born with unexpected or unusual powers are immediately elevated in social class, and sometimes take on special roles in the society such as farseer or master healer.  
Combat analysis: Draconis leonitus is relatively vulnerable during the infancy and maturing stages, but is otherwise extremely dangerous, no matter the type. Most types possess an epidermis impervious to non-enhanced ballistic weapons, and nearly all types possess some degree of resistance to harmful magic. A sharp tactical intellect and diligent sense of self-preservation complicate even the most well-planned ambush, and unexpected mana-based abilities have resulted in the loss of hundreds of soldiers and armored machines during past engagements. Because of this, negotiation is the preferred method of dealing with hostile dragons, as they are highly intelligent, and often greedy as well. If armed conflict is unavoidable, heavy magitechnology and mithril-enhanced conventional arms have shown a relatively high degree of success in eliminating the threat.  
Misc. notes: Dragons, like almost all creatures that surfaced from off-world and came through the nexus, were first identified in combat fighting against Earth's forces in the Death March. First seen over Osaka in the first year of the war, two of them attacked the city, striking the evacuation routes first to stem the flow of refugees leaving the hot zone. What few Japanese defense forces were present were wiped out upon visual contact. One of the dragons was terminated by American air forces launched from the USS Independence positioned off the coast, and the other one retreated immediately. Dragons were also the primary remainder force that destroyed North Korea after their nuclear strikes on the invading armies, which raised their threat level significantly in the eyes of Earth's united armed forces. One of the most unusual cases of conflict with draconis leonitus was in the ruins of the pyramids in Egypt, when American survey forces were ambushed and destroyed by a large red dragon (classed as an Imperial fire drake). Heavy combat units were arrayed and eventually dispatched to combat the creature and eliminate it to restore peace to the area. Although the dragon proved unusually powerful and resilient, US forces managed to gain a critical tactical advantage and seriously wound the creature before heavy casualties could be sustained. The dragon retreated, and US forces stopped to regroup before pursuing. The dragon, who calls himself Tarlock, re-entered the battlefield in "human" form and surrendered peacefully, explaining a deep newfound respect and fascination for human warriors. Through a very odd twist of fate, Tarlock was absolved of his enemy combatant status and allowed to defect to the US military, where he has proved extremely valuable in keeping the Eastern European border secure. Much of our advancement in draconian research is thanks to him, and we sincerely hope that dragons can be accepted as a race of intelligent equals rather than malevolent monsters.

US Research Division Omega - Survey file C437

Nexus II  
by Black Dragon

There's nothing I love more than spinning in an office chair with the Slayers soundtrack blaring on my stereo!  
I'm not entirely sure why I just shared that...

" " human languages, " " demonic languages or languages different than the one in common use in a given scene, writing, ( ) smart-ass author comments, sounds.  
If I don't happen to mention which language in particular is being spoken, then it's not important anyway.

Chapter 6  
Shadows Beckon, Lizards Roar

As the sun broke over the horizon, light spilled over the darkened hills surrounding the urban ruins of Seoul, basking the tall, shattered buildings and mountains of twisted rubble in a picturesque early morning glow. As picturesque as shattered concrete and rusting metal could be, anyway.  
To many of the eastern lands that had survived the Death March, the old gouged-out buildings and torn-up shops would have been a truly depressing sight. But humans have long survived where none were meant to, and to the ragtag groups of survivors scattered around the east, the damaged skyscrapers and piles of scrap meant shelter and raw materials. From the damaged infrastructure the rubble was slowly cleared; parking garages became bazaars, malls became apartment buildings, and parks became farms. Demolished houses were searched over for useful materials, damaged shops were repaired as best the people could and reused, and huge piles of shattered concrete and steel were used to hide the presence of underground dwellings or bunkers.  
Creatures came, too. Raiders, human and not, came to take what little the people had, but in time missionaries, knights, and soldiers all came, and every kill became more costly. Some were ignorant, malevolent beasts that simply wished to nest in the hardened ruins, and these too were dealt with as best the people could. And then others came that were different. Intelligent beings not of human blood, but who would seek to help before they would harm. Demons that the people usually shot on sight greeted them happily and traded peacefully; others wished to take up residence, and offered their skills to protect the humans rather than harm them.  
Though still far from the metropolis it once was, the great Seoul was easily a match for any other settlement grown from the ruins of a nearly exterminated populace.  
It's most respected boast, however, was not the area's rise from rubble to difficult prosperity, but a special clan of assassins that had made their home there. Once feared throughout Japan as the swift knife of those in power, they had lost significant influence after the Death March clearly and definitively changed people's idea of "fear". And so they left, knowing that they had lost their place in the world, and so they sought a new one. And so they found it.  
The ways of the Ninja were the ways of the assassin: clear, silent, swift. They were not warriors that openly defended the innocent from the beasts that roamed the wastes, but champions of vengeance that brought suffering to the enemies of humanity. For whether from the shadows or the sunlight, a kill is a kill, and in such troubled times, the killer must assure he's still alive to kill again. In the absence of a gun a good hiding spot and a dagger will have to do. And if one cannot slay one's enemies openly, to their faces, then one shall slay from hiding, so that one's foes never know what it is that is slowly whittling them away; for fear is the most powerful weapon one can wield.  
This is the way of the Shisou.

Ranma groaned as he slowly became aware of his surroundings, his vision quickly clearing as it adjusted to the merciless shine of the electric light built into the ceiling.  
He squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his head as was his usual practice in preparation to get up. As he did so he evaluated what had happened to him the previous day, and grimaced.  
'Of course the one time I just choose to just avoid women like hell it goes and backfires on me... man...' In all fairness, Ranma wasn't sure that choosing to be a girl's roommate would have made things less complicated, but at this point he would have gladly accepted those complications to get away from his current roomie.  
'Speaking of whom, he's like a foot away from you,' his brain informed itself, activating certain senses before Ranma could take conscious stock of what was currently happening around him.  
"........." He paused for a moment in the action of rubbing his face as he digested this information.  
"GYAH!!" Thump!  
Jerking back so that his back was pressed against the wall that his bed rested against, Ranma glared at Tad, who was sitting in a chair right at the edge of his bed. "What the HELL are you doing?!"  
Tad blinked. "Watching you sleep."  
Ranma twitched. "Well, STOP IT!!"  
Tad cocked his head to one side. "Did you know that you move around when you're asleep? That's weird. I should do something about that."  
Ranma paled, and he felt a cold tremor shoot down his back. "Why... Why me?" He mumbled sadly, sliding off his cot. He was pretty sure his regular defenses that had been hardwired into his brain would protect him in his sleep from all but the most agile and dexterous opponents, but he also recognized that when people were as stupid and crazy as Tad was, it became a dangerous ability in and of itself.  
"This training had better be worth it," Ranma mumbled, putting on his shirt and walking over to the old, partially broken dresser near the door.  
As he withdrew his leather vest and began to put his hidden knives in their usual places, Ranma noticed that there was a large, black shape on the edge of the dresser. Immediately catching his attention, he made it out to be a young deathcrawler, and one that was obviously dead, if the giant wound in the thorax was any indication.  
Ranma leaned a little close to the deceased demon spider, nodding appreciatively. "Hey, this is a pretty good taxidermy job." Matsute had said that Tad kept a dead spider as a pet. And now that Ranma had gotten to know Tad a little better, he was convinced it was one of the idiot's less eerie habits.  
Tad blinked, getting up out of his chair. "Taxi-whaty?"  
Ranma sighed. "You know, the way you stuffed it and all. I mean, the carapace is all glossy and stuff, and the legs look intact. You must have put some effort into that." Obviously the legs had been stuffed well, as the spider was standing up so that its body was fully supported. Not easy to do without damaging the leg exoskeletons, Ranma supposed.  
The mentally unfit Ninja shook his head. "I don't know what you're talking about. I didn't stuff it."  
Ranma rolled his eyes. "I should have guessed. Well, whoever did knew what he was doing." He gently touched one of the legs with his non-gloved hand and ran his finger down it, being careful not to apply too much pressure.  
Then the wanderer frowned. "Wait... this spider wasn't here last night, was it?"  
Tad nodded. "Nah, he likes to wander around in the walls a lot."  
Ranma blinked. "He... likes to wander around?"  
Tad nodded. "Uh huh. So?"  
Ranma stared, frozen, as the demon spider suddenly jerked backward and reared its front legs up, its fangs wiggling malevolently.  
"Uh oh."  
"HSSSSSS!"  
Without further warning the deathcrawler lunged forward for Ranma's face, intending to pierce the skull with its sharpened forelegs and pump its venom directly into the center of the wanderer's nervous system.  
Luckily, Ranma was just a bit faster than that, and snatched the monster arachnid away in mid-lunge with his right hand, protected as it was by the mysterious gauntlet.  
Wincing as the spider wrapped around his hand and attempted to bite it, Ranma turned toward Tad furiously. "What the hell are you doing keeping a live deathcrawler around here?!"  
Tad blinked, and then snorted, as if Ranma had said something ridiculously foolish. "It's not alive, man. DUH."  
Ranma held up his right hand to the light, with the deathcrawler still wrapped around it, trying to chew through his gauntlet to the juicy, nutritious fluids beneath. "Okay, fine. So that's a fatal wound. Which makes this another of those dead things that zombified on their own out in the demilitarized zone." At least, Ranma assumed it had zombified on its own. He had no idea why a necromancer would bother to raise a dead demon spider that was so young. "Matsute said you had a dead spider, not an undead spider!"  
Tad shrugged. "Dead, undead, what's the difference?"  
"A HELL OF A LOT, YOU MORON!!" Ranma yelled, knocking the other trainee down from the sheer volume.  
Fuming, Ranma shoved the deceased arachnid toward his roommate's face. "Now get this thing off of-"  
"SCREEEE!" Ranma was cut off as the deathcrawler let out an ear-piercing shriek, and the pigtailed boy watched with wide eyes as it suddenly jumped off of his hand and onto the floor before skittering away and hiding under Tad's bed.  
Ranma stared at the darkened shadow that hid the undead beast, unable to completely come to terms with what he just saw. "Is... that... that thing... AFRAID of you?!"  
Tad chuckled. "Ah, well, Phil's always been a bit on the skittish side." Then he grinned. "But he's sure taken a liking to you! I've never seen him just jump into somebody's arms like that!"  
Ranma twitched. "It wasn't my ARMS he was jumping for, you idiot."  
"Whatever. I'm sure you two will become best friends!"  
Ranma slowly staggered out of the room, holding his head in his hands. 'If I spend too much time here, I'm going to go insane, or die. And not from the training...'

Mumbling irritably the whole way, Ranma walked down the hallway until he found the "women's dorm" which consisted of a single room clearly marked with a big sign written in English. After stretching slightly, just in case he was going to have to run away quickly, Ranma walked up to the door and knocked.  
"Yes? Who is it?" Came Natalie's voice from behind the door.  
"It's Ranma! I'm here for K! He in?"  
"Just a minute!"  
Ranma blinked as a number of rummaging noises followed the voice, and after a few moments, the door opened.  
"YOW!!" He immediately jumped back the moment he took in the female trainee in all her semi-naked glory, as she had opened the door fully while wearing only a black bra and panties.  
Natalie blinked as Ranma turned around to face the wall opposite her door. "Is something wrong?"  
Ranma grimaced. "Uh... if you're only in your underwear now, what were you doing just a moment ago?"  
She blinked again. "Putting my underwear on."  
"Ah... of course," Ranma mumbled, sweatdropping.  
The female trainee smirked, finally realizing the source of Ranma's discomfort. "What are you so embarrassed about? It's nothing more than you'd see at a normal beach, right?"  
"Uh... K? You around?" Ranma said, raising his voice and trying to change the subject.  
"Yeah, yeah, right here." The metadragon sidled out the doorway, waving his wings slightly to each side to get them nice and limber. Then he looked up at his roommate. "Thanks for the hospitality, sweets! Oh, and don't mind pigtail boy here. I think he's gay."  
"Oh, shut up!" Ranma said irritably.  
Natalie sweatdropped. "Well, you should go and get down to the second floor so that you can get breakfast early, since you're up already."  
"Will do! Thanks!" Ranma said as he grabbed up K and rushed down the hall.

After a short while Ranma reached the fire stairs that served as the primary method of moving through the damaged office building, and he jumped down to the floor immediately below him, still cradling K carefully in one arm.  
"So, how was your first night in Frankenfreak's room?" K asked, raising his species' equivalent of an eyebrow.  
Ranma grunted. "Don't start. I regret my choice, but I'm gonna stick with it for now. After all, I'm not here to have a good time. Training is about hardship and suffering for the sake of improvement." Jumping down another set of stairs, he landed just behind another Ninja trainee, who immediately lost his footing in his surprise and began to tumble headfirst down the stairs.  
"Sorry!" K called out, wincing. As Ranma jumped once again over the railing (incidentally passing the surprised student), the metadragon move from Ranma's arm onto his shoulder, making sure to get a reasonable grip with his talons so he wouldn't fall off.  
"Seriously though, you don't know what you're missing, man. That room has the best view in the whole building. Probably the whole city!"  
Ranma blinked in the middle of launching himself over another handrail, and instead landed on top of it, settling in a crouch. "Wait... that was an interior office... or, it used to be, at least. It didn't have a window."  
K snorted and smirked. "You thought I was talking about outside? Nothing but rubble out there!" Then he jabbed Ranma lightly with his wing. "In case you didn't figure it out from your conversation at the door, Miss Ninja up there sleeps in the nude."  
Ranma turned and stared at K, his face expressing only confusion and curiosity.  
"Uh... K? Can I ask you something?"  
K blinked. "Sure. What's up?"  
Ranma scratched his head, trying to think of the best way to phrase his question. "Well... how come you find human women attractive?"  
K blinked again. Then he laughed. "Ha! I knew it! You ARE gay!"  
CRASH!! Ranma grunted after facefaulting down to the next floor. That hurt!  
"Would you knock it off?! I'm not gay!" Ranma yelled, hardly offended by the accusation but still finding it irritating to have his actions judged like that.  
"Hey, it's cool," K assured him, slowly flapping his wings as he lowered himself down to where Ranma is, "it's okay to be a little different, you know? Just as long as you're not into dragons and pedophilia too, because I'm not like that."  
Ranma twitched and snatched his draconian friend out of the air, holding him in front of his face. "I'm NOT gay, alright? What I meant to ask was... well..." he frowned as he once again tried to articulate his thoughts. "You're a dragon, so you should just be attracted to other dragons, right? Or maybe things that look like your kind, like a lizard, or a cheese grater?"  
K sweatdropped. "I really wish you'd stop that..."  
"Whatever. Do you know what I mean?" Ranma asked, sitting down cross-legged. "It's been bugging me a little ever since the Amazon village."  
K adopted a look of contemplation, and idly tapped one of his claws on the tiled floor. "Well... it's sort of complicated. You see, all true dragons have a bodily form that looks pretty much like a human; it has all the same parts as you guys, and no extra ones. Anyway, all dragons learn to take this form as sort of an intuitive magic trick; after a while, it just becomes second nature. The human form is much more vulnerable, and loses many of the dragon's abilities, but it's also more maneuverable and agile, much smaller if there's a need to be, can use weapons, and it attracts a lot less attention."  
Ranma nodded slowly, taking his time to absorb the information. "Yeah, I know about all that... So sometimes you mate in this human form, and your kind has sort of grown to like it?"  
"Uh..." In total defiance of many theorized biological laws, K's metal scales reddened around his beak. "I don't THINK so... well... I guess we usually do that in our real forms... maybe..."  
"You don't know?" Ranma asked, raising an eyebrow. He found it pretty strange to be ignorant of such an important aspect of your own species' behavior.  
K shook his head. "Honestly, no. I wasn't raised in a normal dragon nest. And I haven't had any other dragons around to learn from."  
"Ah..." Ranma rolled that thought around in his head for a moment. "So would YOU ever mate with a human?"  
K grimaced. "Don't get me wrong man, you're a great guy and everything, but I'm just not interested."  
Thunk!  
Ranma's eye twitched as he shoved the tiny metadragon beak-first into the nearest wall. "Didn't I tell you to cut that out?"  
"Urgh... Yeth... ahm thorry..." K propped his claws up against the wall and pushed away, pulling his head from the degraded plaster.  
As Ranma began to walk away, something occurred to him, and he turned back around.  
"Hey, wait... do YOU have a human form?"  
K blinked as he scraped his beak against his wings. "Well, sure. Like I said, all true dragons do. That only excludes pseudo-dragons, like wyrms and wyverns."  
Ranma raised an eyebrow. "Sooooooo... let's see it, eh?"  
K scoffed. "Well, I can't do it NOW. Duh..."  
Ranma rolled his eyes, sighing lightly. "Of course you can't. So why not?"  
"The first transformation happens when the dragon matures past the infancy stages of its life... er... well, in human terms, it'd be sort of like puberty," the dragon explained awkwardly. "I'm really close to that age, but I think I have a ways to go, still. After the first transformation, a dragon can morph back and forth, and after a little while it becomes really easy to shift."  
Ranma sighed and turned back around. "Great. Just what I need; a dragon teenager."  
K snorted as he hovered up and landed on Ranma's shoulder. "Oh, right, like you're the PICTURE of civility."  
"Yeah, yeah, whatever," Ranma mumbled. "You up for some pancakes?"  
"Actually... I could REALLY go for some silverware right now!"  
Ranma's eye twitched as he realized that K's metal cravings had returned, if not with less ferocity than before. 'I'm going to have a close eye on him. Otherwise, he might eat the supports right out from under us.'

"Ah, Saotome. Is good see you this morning." Matsute didn't turn his head to face the new arrival, his eyes locked on the training apparatus in the middle of the field.  
"Good to see you too, Master." Ranma said humbly, bowing to the elder man. "I await the training you have to offer me."  
The Ninja master nodded slowly. "......... Where is you companion? The dragon of steel?"  
"Ah... he's..." Ranma sweatdropped slightly. "Well, I dropped him off at the forge near the material ore. He doesn't like scrap metal, so I figure it's less wasteful for him to eat ore rather than finished metal tools and stuff."  
The Ninja master remained absolutely silent for a moment, then turned around, completely confused. "What?"  
"It's a metadragon thing. And believe me, we want him eating as much useless metal as possible." A vein popped up on his head as he said this, being reminded of the gold and mithril items that had been lost to the hungry dragon in the past.  
"Ah... if you is saying so. Very well!" Matsute gestured to the apparatus before him. "This be first training ground. Is simple." He pointed to the apparatus, which consisted of several mounted ladders that stretched several meters into the sky with small platforms on top. They were set up in pairs, and in-between each one was a large wooden log that was tied by a rope to a tall scaffold hanging over it. Upon immediate inspection, Ranma could see that the Ninja trainees were jumping from one ladder platform to the other, while striking the log on the way and still preserving enough momentum to make it across the gap.  
"Is practice in both make quick attacks and attack critical points. See you circles on log? They crucial target area. This training teach trainees to make attack quick and make count; often time spent striking heavy blow could leave open to counter attack that end life! Ancient proverb say: 'stick the knife fast, you life will last! Stick the knife deep, and you get head cut up and ground like sardine in meat blender!'"  
Ranma resisted the urge to comment out loud that the second verse of the "proverb" didn't rhyme. "Okay, so you want me to do what those guys are doing, huh?"  
Matsute nodded. "Is so."  
"Well then, let's get this over with." With a cocky smile on his face, Ranma took two steps over toward the training setup, withdrew his Nighthawk sidearm, and fired.  
Blam!! Blam!! Blam!! Blam!! Blam!!  
With a completely neutral expression on his face, Ranma blasted away at the target, striking each target circle dead center and blowing shattered wood chunks out the other side. Then, after five shots, he took an extra moment to aim higher above the log.  
Blam!! Snap!  
The trainees who had been using the training area watched with wide eyes as the rope holding up the log was torn apart, and the target was subjected to gravity's merciless grasp. Thud!  
Ranma turned toward Matsute, looking somewhat annoyed. "Let's get one thing straight, Master: I don't have half my life to spend swatting punching bags or throwing shuriken at dummies. I'm not here to become a Shisou Ninja; I'm here to learn how to do that crazy trick where you split yourself into two. And maybe learn any other useful special techniques you have."  
Matsute shook his head, frowning. "Ah, so impatient. And trigger-happy. But is no good. Ancient proverb say: 'he who no learn to crawl, will never learn to use L33T N1NJ4 5K1LLZ!'"  
Ranma twitched. "I really wish you'd stop that..." straightening, his expression turned serious again. "Get real! I beat you, didn't I?"  
The Ninja master shrugged. "Is true. So what that mean? Ninjitsu not about being stronger than enemy. Does fish claim to fly because it can swim better than bird?"  
Ranma blinked, then scratched his chin. "Well... is it a flying fish?"  
Matsute sweatdropped. "You not supposed to think about it..."  
The pigtailed man frowned and crossed his arms over his chest. "Well I don't mean to be arrogant Master, but let's be honest; whether I'm perfect Ninja material or not, I'm years ahead of these other saps you're training in both speed and dexterity!"  
After a moment he felt numerous glares against his back. "Uh... no offense, saps!" He added, turning around to face the numerous Ninja who were training in the park clearing.  
Turning back to his master, Ranma smirked. "If you insist on this 'crawling' nonsense first, go on and test me! I'll take anything you can throw at me!"  
Matsute frowned, and lowered his head for a few moments in contemplation.  
Finally, he looked up at Ranma again. "Very well. You want test to see if you good enough, you get test. You come with me."

"Ah, Natalie, David, is test room ready yet?"  
The two trainees nodded, looking slightly out of breath.  
"M-Master, why did you need the room ready on such short notice?" David asked, wiping his brow. The "test room", as it was simply called, was actually an underground corridor that had served an old sewer drainage system that had been decommissioned, but not destroyed, years before the war. Though most of the system had been destroyed by earth magic, the corridor and the adjacent tunnel had survived, and Matsute had seen fit to tear it apart and rebuild it with every trap that could be engineered with the materials at hand.  
The Ninja master shook his head. "Certain trainee insist on taking test before he ready..." He sighed as Ranma entered and began to stretch. "I cannot teach him. Boy has no patience."  
"He will **learn** patience," David said.  
Matsute snorted. "Much anger in him. Like his father."  
The American nodded. "Was I any different when you taught me?"

Natalie stared at the scene, then whispered to Ranma. "Do you know what they're talking about?"  
Ranma shook his head. "I'm kind of wondering about him knowing my father, really."  
"Enough of this!" Matsute declared, walking up to a wall switch. "You want take test? Very well!"  
Cha-chunk! Whrrrr...  
Ranma turned and crossed his arms over his chest, watching as various parts of the tunnel began to move. After a few moments, the entire area was a chaotic maelstrom of motion, with numerous wooden poles jabbing out of the walls and floors wildly, and the occasional jet of flame bursting from small holes scattered throughout the small gauntlet.  
"..............." Ranma stared impassively at the obstacle course. "This is IT?"  
Matsute nodded. "Yes. You get to other end without being struck once, and you pass test."  
"GIMME A BREAK!!" Ranma shouted, startling the Ninja, "I've seen golf courses more intimidating than this! This is an insult!"  
"Well aren't we cocky," David muttered, his eyebrow twitching. He himself had only recently passed the course, and just barely.  
"I dodge bullets on a semi-regular basis," Ranma said disdainfully, "this little jungle gym is a waste of my time."  
"Well, if you so sure of self..." Matsute began, scratching his chin. "There is more difficult level, but-"  
"I'll do it," Ranma interrupted, his arms crossed over his chest.  
The Ninja master bit his lip. "Is very, very dangerous, though. I not sure that I able to give test to those I not sure of. Is very irresponsible of teacher."  
"Just jack up the difficulty on this thing, all right? I want to hurry up and learn that cool multi-form trick!"  
Matsute sighed, and then walked over to a separate, heavier-looking switch on the wall. "Okay, but no say I not warn you..." Ch-chunk!  
A heavy grinding noise echoed deep within the tunnel, and dozens of large spikes suddenly began shooting out of the walls down the length of the course at irregular intervals.  
Ranma nodded seriously. "Well, that's more-" Grrrrrrrnd!  
A second grinding noise preceded the appearance of four pendulums that ended in heavy blades, swinging from side to side in the only remaining spaces throughout the obstacle run that looked even remotely safe.  
Chunk! A moment later, several spears jabbed down from various points on the ceiling, staying still and blocking any clear path over the many obstacles.  
Ranma sweatdropped. "Huh... so... I have to make it through all that without being touched once?"  
Matsute shook his head. "No, no. This very difficult course, so will settle for you making it to the other end alive."  
"Okay. I guess that's not too bad..." Feeling his confidence return to him, Ranma walked up to the beginning of the tunnel and began to stretch.  
He didn't get very far, however, as a sudden flash of light alerted him to a nearly invisible object between him and the beginning obstacles.  
"Whoa! Hey! Is this razor wire?!" Ranma backed away, twitching, as he scanned the length of the course, just barely making out small strings of lethal metal among the whirlwind of poles, spikes, and blades.  
"Ah, yes! You catch that! Maybe you is good enough after all!" Matsute said, looking extremely pleased.  
Ranma looked less so, and began to back away.  
"Wow! Are you really going to go through that?"  
Ranma froze at Natalie's excited gasp. "Uh..."  
Looking over at the girl, Ranma felt his doom settling upon him as a direct result of the shining adoration coming from the female Ninja's eyes.  
"You're incredible! Master doesn't even make his master graduates go through the death course!"  
Even David, as jealous as he was, had to nod his head in admission. "Man, you really are something..."  
"Eh heh heh... yeah... I really am... aren't I?" Ranma said, his voice cracking horribly. 'Me and my big mouth... this sucks...' "Are you sure this is level two?"  
Matsute shrugged. "Is only other level. I design for those who wish to become true masters of Shisou and take on pupils."  
"Er... yeah... it's kind of a long way from a 'level two' difficulty, you know?" Ranma said, bigsweating nervously.  
"You going, or no?" The Ninja master asked, annoyed. "If you wish go back to first level, you just say so."  
'God dammit.' Ranma rubbed his head, and then sighed. "Here goes everything..."

"Oh wow! Look at him go!" Natalie squealed excitedly, watching as the pigtailed wanderer dashed in-between the maelstrom of hydraulic polearms.  
"Whoa! Look out! He made it! This guy is for real! I think he's going to-"  
Wschink!  
The three spectator Ninja winced.  
"Ouch. He still alive?"  
"Wait! He's getting back up!"  
"Should complete course fast, then. Even if make it to other end alive, may die from blood loss now."  
Thwack!  
"Ooh! So close!"  
Sching!  
"Ranma! Watch out for the... uh... okay, never mind..."  
"He's almost to the end! This is it!"  
Thunk!  
The three Ninja winced again, and Natalie held a hand over her mouth as she suddenly found herself violently ill.  
"That's... That's just not right..." David murmured, looking pale. "Well... he did make it, didn't he?"  
Matsute sighed. "First we check for pulse; then I tell you. Natalie, you go prepare bed in clinic room, yes?"  
"O-Of course Master!" Natalie said, stumbling on her way out in a manner not at all befitting a high school athlete, much less a trained assassin.  
"Kids today... always in a rush to prove themselves. Ah well, it's like they say: 'Forgive the young, for they are impatient, and will probably be killed and eaten soon anyway'."  
David sweatdropped. "It seems a bit... disenheartening, don't you think?"  
"You shut up and drag Ranma to clinic; he bleeding all over test course."  
"Er, yes Master."

"Explain this to me one more time."  
Condoleezza Rice sighed and massaged her head. "Sir, the demon we had imprisoned in Arizona has escaped."  
"......... The one with the geeky name?"  
"Yes sir. Demetrius."  
"......... The one I ordered executed a while back?"  
"Uh..." Condoleezza chewed on her lip, wondering how best to explain the complications with his order. "... Yes."  
"Damn! I thought he was dead! How long does it take to execute somebody in Arizona?! I should have sent him to Texas instead!" George W. Bush scowled as he recalled the precautions he had ordered in the demon's imprisonment. "How'd he get out?"  
Rice sighed again. "It was a carefully calculated strike; a diversionary force entered sensor range and engaged a dispatched combat patrol while a small, but obviously powerful unit infiltrated the facility and ripped apart the machines keeping the demon imprisoned."  
"Well, then recapture him!" Bush said impatiently. "We got him the first time, didn't we?"  
"That's a problem too," Condoleezza muttered in frustration, "when I say he's escaped, I don't just mean he's no longer in his cell; we can't locate him at all. If our sensors in the military base are to be trusted, he pretty much just up and vanished. Judging by the amount of energy and damage that he's frequently generating, I'd say he's no longer even in the United States."  
Bush frowned deeply, clasping his hands together under his chin. "What does the our intelligence division have for us?"  
Condoleezza sweatdropped. "I called them immediately after I found out," she deadpanned, "their exact words were: 'Yaermon? He **escaped**? When did we catch that guy?'"  
"Weren't we going to have a meeting to get the intelligence divisions fixed?" The president asked, annoyed.  
"Yes sir, but then you skipped the meeting to see the new Harry Potter movie."  
"Oh, right. I remember now," Bush said, scratching his chin. "I hear it didn't do that well in the box office now that the world is all nutty; half the people who saw it thought it was a documentary about Stanford."  
Condoleezza's eye twitched. "Sir, if we could stay on topic?"  
"Right, right," Bush said, turning around. "Rummy, what do you think we should do?"  
Donald Rumsfeld, who had been drawing "X"s on a globe sitting on the President's desk during the whole conversation, grunted and stood up. "Well, since we don't know where the demon is, we should destroy Iraq immediately!"  
Bush clapped his hands and then pointed to Rumsfeld excitedly. "Yes! I like that! Let's do your idea!"  
"We can't invade Iraq," Condoleezza said irritably, "the Arab nations outside of Africa were all but wiped out in the war; except for a few traders, there isn't a living thing left in Iraq."  
"We could kill the traders," Rumsfeld said hopefully.  
Bush frowned, scratching his head. "No, I think Condi's right. If we just start invading crippled countries at random, people will think we're trying to take over the world, and we really don't need that right now."  
"Absolutely," Rice said, nodding, "not now, when I'm so close..."  
"What?" Bush said, looking confused.  
"Nothing. So what **are** we going to do about Yaermon?" She asked.  
"The same thing I always do when I don't know what to do," Bush said decisively, "ignore it and work on my reelection campaign." Then he frowned. "Who's running, again?"  
An inky blackness suddenly rose from the shadow cast by Bush's desk against the light, and the black-cowled form of Karl Rove materialized, his eyes glowing crimson with evil power. "The candidates include yourself, John Kerry, Ralph Nader, and Lord Grimtal Nawth'laieem, supreme lich overlord of the hellplane Sholmath."  
Condoleezza nodded. "We should start making attack ads against Grimtal immediately, as he's the most charismatic and charming of our opponents."  
"For an independent, he's unusually popular," Rove agreed. "Worse yet, his campaign promises to purge the land of the weak and helpless while spreading war and devastation across the globe greatly appeals to Republican voters who are displeased with our poor government spending decisions."  
"He does sound like he's on the ball," Rumsfeld admitted, going back to marking countries for destruction on the cardboard globe.  
"Yes, he is," Rove said, turning back toward the President. "He'll draw even more votes from those who wish anyone but you to win, but can't help but find Kerry and Nader laughably pathetic."  
Condoleezza looked worried. "That's all the liberals except the Democrat loyalists!"  
"Precisely," the Hell-spawned advisor said evenly. "Nawth'laieem will next attempt to leverage the votes by sending his agents of darkness to slaughter those who would oppose him most strongly; specifically, the Green party."  
Bush's eyes widened, and he jumped up out of his chair. "We have to stop him!"  
"Why?" Condoleezza asked, blinking.  
The President stopped and thought about it. "Good point." Then he sat back down and turned to face Karl Rove. "You sure know a lot about this Grimmy guy, Karl."  
The agent of the shadows nodded. "Yes, well, actually, he's my uncle. Or was, before he further defiled his tainted soul with the forbidden arts of necromancy in exchange for the agonizing immortality of undeath." He paused. "Speaking of which, I kind of promised him my vote come November. No hard feelings, Dubya."  
"Damn!" Bush cursed. "I don't want to lose to some fancy magic corpse! How about... can we just make up lies about him, like saying that he kills baby kittens for fun or something?"  
"Actually, that's not a lie," Rumsfeld muttered, "he killed three of them at the preliminary debates. Plus Dennis Kucinich."  
"No wonder he's polling so well," the troubled President murmured, "this is going to be harder than I thought..."

(I would like to apologize in advance for any offense this section may have caused, and assure my readers that this painfully biased departure from what passes for a plot in these stories is a reaction to all the brain damage caused by the American election campaigns. Sometimes it does NOT pay to be an informed voter.)

"Ow... Ow... Ow..." Ranma muttered expressions of pain like a mantra as he climbed stiffly up the stairs, one of his arms in a cast and one of his legs wrapped so tightly in red-stained bandages that he was unable to bend his knee.  
"Damn Ninja master with his damn traps and his damn proverbs with the damn 'he who does not suffer for his art will not impress hot Ninja chicks'..." Gritting his teeth, Ranma pulled himself up on the handrail into the hallway leading to his room.  
Gasping for breath, the newly proven trainee began walking unsteadily toward the room he shared with Tad. "Okay... almost there... you can do it Ranma..."  
Almost falling down as he grasped the doorknob, Ranma managed to pull himself up and open the door, stumbling painfully into his bedroom.  
"Gah, finally!" Ignoring a strangely entranced Tad who was watching from atop his own bed, Ranma fell forward onto his mattress, savoring it's accommodating softness as he squirmed about to get under the covers.  
After managing to get most of his body covered by the dirty patchwork quilt that covered his bed, Ranma turned his head toward the wall and sighed deeply, already drifting into unconsciousness.  
Not that he'd get off that easy. "Hey, Ranma!" Tad said suddenly.  
'God dammit...' "What do you want, Tad?" the wanderer mumbled, not turning toward the other boy.  
"Do you not like Phil?"  
Ranma remained silent for a few moments. "............ Phil who?"  
"My pet spider, remember?" Tad asked, slightly annoyed.  
"Oh," Ranma mumbled unpleasantly. "I loathe the undead."  
"Even Phil?" Tad asked, somewhat hurt.  
"ESPECIALLY Phil," Ranma said bitterly.  
Tad sighed. "I figured as much. Well, maybe you'll like him more once you two become closer."  
Ranma's eyes snapped open, and he jerked upright painfully. "If you EVER bring that freak of nature near me, I swear I'm going to rip off your arm and beat you to death with it!"  
"Would you calm down?!" Tad shouted. "I mean, look! He's just trying to say hi!"  
"What do you mean he's just trying to-" Ranma froze as he caught some movement at the foot of his bed, and the color drained from his face as he watched a small lump that had previously gone unnoticed suddenly dart toward his leg.  
"EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!"

Demetrius Yaermon stretched his heavily muscled arms, relishing in the sensation of having tangible flesh that tingled with feeling. He grinned and ran a hand through his long black hair, tugging on it slightly to stimulate the sensations that he was at last experiencing.  
"Feels good to have an actual body again, eh?" Doppler asked, idly filing his nails on one set of hands with the other set as the other demon lord stretched leisurely.  
"Months of invincibility... a soul barely contained in a shell of pure power..." Demetrius grinned again. "It is a superb thing, but not pleasant. And these human fools will BURN for their insolence!!"  
The psilor turned toward Doppler, his eyes twin pools of pale blue, glassy windows that differed greatly from human and demon alike.  
"I thank you... Master," the psilor said the word awkwardly, as if he was trying to fight an instinctual urge to say it mockingly. "And now that I have my freedom, I will rain destruction upon these weak, pitiful fools!" Demetrius stretches his arms again, carefully flexing the muscles of his tangible state. "They will suffer a hundredfold for daring to oppose me!"  
Doppler had been trying very hard not to roll his eyes throughout his companion's rant, and cleared his throat as he felt his tolerance reaching its limit. "Demetrius, really, putting aside the fact that the humans handed you your unstable, energy-based ass the last time you sought to oppose them," the veirheelu mage began, ignoring the other demon's deadly glare, "you seem to be short an army. It's quite difficult to invade a nation without one, I hear."  
"Your sarcasm is wearing upon me," Demetrius said dangerously, blue arcs of energy crackling around his hands as he balled them into fists.  
Doppler was unperturbed by the implied threat. "That was hardly sarcasm; everything I said was true." Doppler stood up and put away his nail file, clasping two arms behind his back as he admired the view from the newly-installed balcony near the peak of Phoenix Mountain.  
The psilor snorted. "Find an army that feeds off war, and you have an army that's cheap to feed. There are thousands of demonic bands scattered throughout the realms just waiting for fresh land to bloody."  
Doppler just smirked. "I'm afraid your simplistic proverbs won't help you this time, old **friend**." He punctuated the last word slightly, attempting to remind the creature before him of the debts he still owed. "The Americans control the Nexus now, as well as all travel through it. Any creature that appears immediately hostile is exterminated, and they've begun establishing formal trade routes alongside their programs of study. Assuming you could get past the outpost, I'm certain whatever allies you manage to scrounge up among your chaos-embroiled lands and properties-most of which have already been seized or inherited, by the way-won't be as lucky."  
The very air began to thicken as energy began to crackle around Demetrius in waves, the mighty psilor fighting his rage with little success. "THEN GIVE ME AN ARMY!! YOU KNOW OF A WAY!!"  
Doppler sighed, a sweatdrop rolling down his head. "Would you PLEASE stop that? The charge is messing up my hair." He smoothed down a few strands atop his head that were standing up in irritation, as if to punctuate his point.  
Frzack! Demetrius' form shifted, and where once was a perfectly human-looking man with strange eyes stood a merely humanoid-shaped cloud of pure power.  
"YOUR JOKES TRY MY PATIENCE, MAGE," the psilor snarled, an energy sphere collecting in his hand.  
Doppler looked nonplussed. "Oh, right. You're going to kill ME. I'm sure that'll solve ALL your problems."  
The energy form's eyes narrowed in a crude imitation of a sneer. "I DON'T SOLVE MY PROBLEMS. I **OBLITERATE** THEM!!"  
The veirheelu blinked, and rubbed his chin in consideration. "Hmmmm... touche."  
"IF YOU WILL NOT HELP ME, THEN YOU **WILL** DIE HERE." Demetrius declared, his hands growing into large, spindly claws as energy crackled around them.  
"And how, exactly, am I supposed to do that?" The demon mage asked conversationally. "All I can offer you is a small horde of undead and a few well-built golems. You've been on enough campaigns to know the limitations of such creatures."  
Demetrius twitched, feeling even more annoyed as the mage's words continued to ring true. Lesser undead were easily vanquished, and greater undead were among the most treacherous and unreliable creatures in all the realms when mixed with anything still possessing the heat of life. Golems were perfectly loyal, but incompetent and clumsy; in the long run a golem army did almost as much damage to itself as to the enemy.  
"YOU HAVE YOUR WAYS," the psilor hissed, "I AM WELL AWARE YOU HAVE CONTACTS IN ALL THE BROTHERHOODS, AND YOU HAVE A CONTRACT WITH THE SLAYER'S AND MAGE'S GUILDS AS WELL. YOUR KNOWLEDGE OF ANCIENT ARTIFACTS AND WEAPONS IS UNMATCHED EVEN AMONG THE INNER CIRCLES OF RANTATH! YOU HAVE MUCH TO OFFER ME!"  
"Unless I'm dead," Doppler reasoned, shrugging.  
"Graaaaaugh!!" Demetrius screamed in frustration as his energy form once again stabilized. "Why do you taunt me?!"  
Doppler sighed. "It's fun. But besides that, I really have no desire to destroy the humans."  
"And why NOT?!" the psilor snarled. "If not for those pitiful scholars, you and I would rule this world, waging glorious, bloody wars against the other demon lords to conquer territory, not huddling in the shadows to protect our brethren from their cowardly war machines!"  
Doppler shook his head as he entered Phoenix Mountain's peak, opening up the double-doors to his lavishly decorated main quarters. "There, you see? Right there. I don't see why we NEED to rule this world. If that is our ambition, why this realm? There are countless others, the vast majority of which aren't capable of such effective defense."  
"You are **weak**," Demetrius snarled.  
The veirheelu just chuckled. "Well now, I'd rather be weak and comfortable in my big, freshly furnished mountain stronghold than strong and locked up in an oversized superconductor."  
Feeling the heat rise around him again, Doppler smirked and picked up a cookie from the large jar of snacks kept on the night table next to his bed (one of his favorite perks of being a demon lord). "Temper, temper, Yaermon. Do not forget the **reason** you are able to maintain your unstable form for so long."  
Smiling brightly, the demon mage whirled around to face the psilor. "If it weren't for my research, the humans would have slain you LONG ago. And OF COURSE there's no need to remind you of that little oath of servitude you swore to me when I bestowed that... gift... upon you?"  
Demetrius snorted, but held his tongue, a far less volatile reaction than Doppler expected. Doppler knew that the oath meant nothing to the displaced demon lord; it was only now, when he had no one else to turn to, that the psilor would ever defile his tongue by calling another "Master".  
"You are defeated. Dishonored. Many believe you to be dead," the veiheelu said bluntly, idly taking a small bite out of his cookie and swallowing it. "You now possess nothing, save your own admittedly considerable power, and your allegiance to me. Choose your path now, psilor, for I will not risk my own ambitions for your sake once again."  
Demetrius twitched, obviously struggling with the implications of the decision. "The humans must PAY for their treachery..."  
"There you go again," Doppler sighed, rolling his eyes. "You tried to kill them. They stopped you. That's not 'treachery', that's 'combat'."  
"They hide behind their steel magic!" The psilor raged, his hands balled into fists and set aflame with blue fire. "They lurk beyond our sight and lob their alchemy and crude projectiles! The cowards do not deserve to live!"  
"Which is why I prefer intelligence and study over strength; you can learn something from just about anyone or anything: a coward, a weakling, a hero, or a rock. Pure power is only good for killing and intimidation," Doppler said brightly, tossing the rest of his cookie in his mouth.  
"I fail to see why you would require more than that," Demetrius growled, finally letting down his guard and taking a seat in one of the many velvet-padded chairs strewn about the late Saffron's redecorated chambers.  
"And that, my dear friend, is merely one reason why you were defeated by the humans while I've conducted my horrible and unreasonably dangerous experiments in peace and quiet. The humans of Earth realm aren't really so clever as they are adaptable; so long as you don't threaten them directly, you'd be surprised how much you can get away with!"  
Demetrius seethed, his teeth grating as he clutched the armrests of his chair. "You would surrender this world to these rats, then?"  
Doppler snorted. "And why not? I don't want it. Aside from a few... speculated theories, and maybe a few old trinkets scattered about the globe, the humans themselves are the most fascinating thing on this rotten, magic-stunted realm. It would be an unforgivable shame if they were to die out before they've been stripped of all useful knowledge."  
Seeing his "subordinate" scowl, Doppler sighed again and crossed his upper arms over his chest condescendingly. "If it makes you feel any better-and I just KNOW it will-I have no intention of using you against the humans in any manner that doesn't involve killing them. Serve me and, if nothing else, you'll have ample opportunities to work out the anger from your irrational little 'grudge'."  
Demetrius snarled and stood up. "I do not want to 'work out' my grudge! I will satisfy it, and exterminate them all!!"  
A sweatdrop rolled down Doppler's head, and his eye twitched. "Were you even **listening**? I just said I don't want to do that!"  
"Oh, I will play your game for now, mage," the psilor said threateningly, "but I expect to be compensated for my services. And once I acquire enough resources, I will see your little Guinea pigs all turned to **ash**." His pale eyes flickered slightly, and bright blue arcs of electricity ran along his arms and across his shoulders.  
Doppler sweatdropped again. "Uh... well, whatever." Then he picked up the jar on his nightstand and held it out to the other demon lord. "Cookie?"  
"............ Okay."

Ranma fought to keep his breathing steady as Natalie applied the last few pressure points to his back, causing sharp stabs of pain as the numbness that had been spreading all over his body slowly ebbed away.  
"Okay... are you starting to feel better?" the female Ninja asked worriedly, caressing the swollen lump on Ranma's leg that marked the spider bite.  
"A little," Ranma mumbled bitterly, trying to remain absolutely still as the applied antidote began to circulate along with the venom. "In the sense that I can feel pain now instead of feeling nothing at all."  
"Yeah, well you were lucky," K admonished sleepily, quite tired from being up at the late hour, "the deathcrawler was young when it was raised, and it's been dead for so long that its venom had decayed. If it was alive, then there's nothing these people have here that could have saved you."  
"Thanks for the pick-me-up," Ranma murmured darkly.  
"Well, I've applied and wrapped plenty of antidote, and the salve should help the swelling," Natalie said, washing her hands in a dish next to Ranma's infirmary cot (at this point they were considering putting his name on it, as he had already used the same one three times in two days). "However, I'm still worried about the area around the actual bite... even when the antidote is applied right away, it can destroy and dissolve the poisoned cells very quickly."  
"He's fine!" Shouted an impatient fourth voice, causing Ranma, Natalie, and K to grit their teeth in anger. "Hurry up and help Phil! He's not breathing!"  
Natalie turned around slowly, a thin aura enveloping her. Behind her, where he had been waiting semi-patiently as Ranma's wounds were treated, Tad sniffled over the mutilated body of the (formerly) undead spider, it having been reduced to completely dead by virtue of Ranma crushing it flat and then beating it with his bed frame (an impressive feat when he was still injured and suffering from a fresh deathcrawler bite).  
"Tad... if you and that ugly little **spot** that used to be a monster don't get out of here **this instant**, I'm going to make sure you remain here in the infirmary for a LONG TIME."  
Tad stared at the girl standing over him threateningly. "Huh?"  
"She means go away or she'll beat you," Ranma said, hoping that the girl wouldn't actually hurt the unstable Ninja; if she did, it would affect Ranma's conscience when he beat Tad himself.  
Tad sniffled again, then stood up with "Phil's" bloody remains carefully cradled in the blanket he held in his arms. "You... You're all just a bunch of... a bunch of... nasty zombie-haters!"  
Ranma blinked. "Well, I can hardly deny that. Now get lost, freakjob."

As the idiot Ninja walked away sulking, Natalie rinsed the washcloth she was using to clean Ranma's bite and began to gently scrub his back. "Don't worry about that fool; other than letting that spider wander around, he usually isn't very dangerous."  
"I'm sure I'll find that more comforting once I can stand up again," Ranma said sourly, poking at the swollen lump that was his left thigh.  
"Well, if worse comes to worse we could always hire the priest outside the ruins to come in here and fix any really bad damage." The female Ninja started to move past Ranma's back and began wiping his shoulders, but allowed her eyes to roam over the martial artist's bare, wet back, licking her lips as the room's dim electric lighting caused his muscular form to glisten ever so slightly.  
"Mmmm... you have some pretty ugly scars back here," she said tenderly, feeling certain impulses take control of her libido. Ranma did have many scars on his back, but really, Natalie found that the assortment of thin, faded marks only enhanced the "mighty warrior" image that she was already infatuated with.  
Ranma shrugged his shoulders, feeling a little drowsy from his own exhaustion, as well as Natalie's efforts to keep him comfortable. "Yeah, well I've been in some ugly scrapes. Hell, the lump from when you clubbed me over the head only healed recently."  
Natalie blushed, but then leaned forward, wrapping her arms around Ranma's torso and whispering into his ear. "You know, I never did... apologize... to you for doing that."  
Ranma blinked, feeling slightly disoriented by the sensation of the girl's warm breath in his ear. "Uh... actually, you did. Right when I woke up, remember."  
Natalie and K sweatdropped.  
"Dude, do little Ranma a favor and shut up," the metadragon said bluntly, causing Natalie to raise an eyebrow at him.  
"Who asked you?" The pigtailed man groused, blushing heavily. He wasn't so dense that he couldn't see where this was all leading, but that didn't change the fact that he had absolutely no idea what to do about it.  
"Hmm, a shy one, eh?" Natalie giggled, pressing her body more tightly against Ranma's back. "You know, a lot of girls find that a real turn-on..."  
K raised his head from where he was resting, his interest peaking.  
"Whoa! Down boy!" Ranma called, giving the dragon an annoyed glance.  
Natalie, misinterpreting the outburst, giggled louder and moved her hand downward, openly groping Ranma's groin.  
K began to snicker, and Ranma blinked before swallowing heavily.  
"Oh-kay... I'm not feeling this..."  
"Oh?" Natalie said huskily. "Let me try a little harder..." To Ranma's growing alarm, the Ninja pulled her hand up to his waist, and then began to slide her fingers under the waistband of his pants.  
"Uhm, you don't really understand..." Ranma said nervously, causing Natalie to pause in confusion, "I'm **NOT** feeling this... at all."  
There was absolute silence as the other two occupants of the room allowed this to sink in.  
K was the first to speak, his eyes wide. "Well, I take it somebody's going to get hurt very badly now."  
Natalie, trembling, slowly got to her feet, and then clenched one hand into a fist. "TAD!! I'M GOING TO RIP YOU APART, YOU LITTLE PRICK!!"

Ranma and K winced as Natalie yelled, and sweatdropped as she stepped out of the infirmary room, hoping that she wouldn't upset the building's other residents with all the noise.  
K turned toward his companion, his expression holding only pity for the pigtailed man. "I... I'm so sorry, Ranma. I mean... this is HORRIBLE."  
Ranma frowned as he began to squeeze his upper thigh, hoping to feel some sensation in his legs. "Tell me about it. With my legs like this I can't even stand up, much less fight! And how hard is it going to be to go to the bathroom now?! This sucks!"  
K sweatdropped, but decided not to comment. He supposed that Ranma's perspective was right, in this case; if you were paralyzed from the waist down, there were more important things to consider than your sexual endeavors. "Don't worry about it too much, man. I'm sure there's some magic spell that can... fix... you... up?"  
The metadragon trailed off as Ranma stood up shakily.  
"Okay...... Whew! I guess it's not permanent after all. That's a relief!" He began to pat his legs down, and K twitched.  
"So, what, were you faking it?" K asked, rather annoyed.  
"Naw, it just took a little time for the antidote to spread down there, I guess." Ranma began to pat his legs down to circulate the flow of blood, and hopefully speed up his recovery. "I'm kinda hungry. You wanna go down the mess hall and grab something?"  
K sweatdropped again. "Now? It's like 10 o'clock!"  
"So? I'm hungry."  
The metadragon could hardly find an argument against that. "What about Natalie?"  
"I think she's going to have her hands full with the dork," Ranma said dismissively. "Besides, I'm tired and injured. I don't need any more strenuous activity for tonight."  
K shrugged as he jumped up and then flew over to Ranma, landing on his shoulder as the wanderer unsteadily made his way to the door. "Whatever. Can I have your fork?"  
"No."

"Are you sure you feeling better?" Matsute asked, Ranma, one eyebrow raised. Though Natalie had seemed... unusually overjoyed with Ranma's level of recovery, it had still been only a day before that he had suffered the traps of the testing grounds, and then was attacked by a deathcrawler.  
"I'm fine," Ranma groused, doing his best to stretch despite the tight bandage wrappings and numerous wounds that had only begun to heal. "If I can't deal with having to train while I'm injured, I might as well be dead out in the wastes."  
The Ninja master smiled slightly. "Such bravado. Yet there wisdom in words. Look past pain, discomfort, and fear. Find power within self, and take. World is unforgiving place; you either fight it, or die. Ancient proverb say-"  
"Master?" Ranma interrupted impatiently. "Not that I don't appreciate the heady pep-talk, but could we get on with this?"  
"Hmph. Fine," Matsute sulked, wanting to finish his line. "Step one is learning advanced stance for Shisou style. Is very unusual form, and require great balance and determination to master."  
With that explanation, Matsute backed away from Ranma slightly, then took up a backward-leaning position in the center of the dojo floor.  
The Ninja master smirked slightly. "Now you punch me."  
Ranma frowned, then shrugged, pulling back the fist which didn't have his gauntlet on it. "Okay... _dragon fist_!!"  
KA-KROOM!!

The next day...  
"Okay, now we try again," Matsute said irritably, having had most of his body wrapped in bandages. Behind him was a section of the dojo wall that had a hole blown through it, and had been hastily covered up with a number of wooden boards (though they hadn't yet hidden the huge black mark circling the hole). "Only this time, you use regular punch."  
Ranma sweatdropped. "Well, you gotta say that! I 'aint no mind reader." He took up a ready stance. "Just say the word."  
Matsute again took up his advanced Ninjitsu stance, holding both his arms loosely at his sides and leaning backward such that it looked like his body was going to fall over.  
The Ninja master winced, feeling the position start to put a strain on his injuries from the previous day. "Now you punch-ow! Cramp! Wai-"  
Thwack! Pow!

The next day...  
"Maybe we should take a couple days off?" Ranma offered, sweatdropping heavily. "I mean, you've already missed two days of instructing your other students, and I don't know how much more of this you can take."  
Matsute grit his teeth, and fought the urge to finger the large gauze pad taped over his eye. "No. We continue until you learn proper technique!"  
"Well, we should at least stop this whole thing where I train by attacking you. I'm not exactly learning much from it anyway," Ranma reasoned.  
"Yes," the Ninja master admitted, "but it be harder to teach without example."  
Ranma blinked. "But you already showed me an example. A few, actually." Then, to Matsute's surprise, the pigtailed boy leaned back slightly, holding his head forward. His arms hung loosely at his side, and to the ignorant observer, it would have looked as he was only moments from falling down.  
"Ah! That stance!"  
"I saw you use it in our first fight," Ranma said, smirking. "It looked kind of weird at first, but then I saw how you used the positioning to dodge all my short strikes."  
In demonstration, Ranma pivoted slightly on the foot in the back, shifting his upper body immediately with a minimal change in position, while still keeping perfect balance.  
Ranma dropped the stance and smirked. "I've already got the form down, so why don't you go take a nap or something, old man?"  
Matsute's expression was perfectly neutral. "Very good, yes. But not perfect. Use of 'whispered souls' technique require perfect form. You still have far to go." 'It took me months to get the basic form down of that stance, and this child mimics it without actual instruction? The spirits must be playing some kind of joke on me!'  
"What's wrong with my form?" Ranma asked, slightly annoyed, and cautiously taking up the stance again.  
Rather than responding, Matsute slowly reached forward for Ranma's stomach with a single finger, poking the martial artist in the gut even as he tried to swing away and causing him to stumble and lose his form.  
"Hey! What's that about?!" Ranma complained, rubbing his stomach irritably.  
"Is weakness of basic form stance; you learn to cover opening in lower torso in time."  
Matsute turned around, his hands clasped together behind his back. "In meantime... nap sound good."  
Ranma grumbled as he got back up, glaring at the old Ninja master as the man left through the front door of the main dojo.  
"Hmph. I didn't hit him hard enough yesterday."

"G'night K," Ranma mumbled sleepily, nearly stumbling as he headed up the stairs.  
The metadragon blinked, then fly up to land atop his head, hoping that he wouldn't unbalance his companion. "Yo, what's up? You look exhausted!"  
"I **am** exhausted," Ranma said simply, his eyelids drooping.  
K blinked. "Why? You didn't get hurt again, did you? I thought you were mostly better?"  
The pigtailed boy yawned, then grasped the handrail of the stairs and continued hauling himself up to his room. "The old man had me practicing ki manipulation, since I've mostly got his fancy stance down already. I was practicing ki bursts for a couple of hours."  
K was about to ask another question, when Ranma suddenly continued.  
"And THEN I accidentally set one of the dojo on fire, since the Hyoken training altered my aura. Then I had to rush around trying to put that out. Then the geezer asked me to show how I burned down the whole building just practicing the technique he showed me, and when I demonstrated it I accidentally set HIM on fire."  
A sweatdrop slowly rolled down K's head.  
"Then as punishment, I had to demolish the burnt dojo myself and haul away the burnt timbers. Plus they made me do a whole bunch of other chores like sweeping and junk."  
"Whoa...... rough day?"  
Ranma snorted. "Nah. It's hard work, sure, but that's sort of to be expected. I'm just glad I don't have any new bandages."  
When the wanderer reached his floor, he was about to continue toward the room he shared with Tad when he realized that K was still sitting on his head.  
"Uh... hey, shouldn't you be getting to your room?"  
The metadragon sighed. "Nah. Apparently Natalie's 'in the mood'; David's missing and there's all sorts of noise coming from her room. I think I'll crash with you and the nut for tonight."  
Ranma raised an eyebrow. "I would have thought you'd wanna watch."  
K snorted and drew his head up, looking offended. "There's a line between lechery and perversion, you know! Just because I like seeing a girl naked doesn't mean I want to see her doing it with some dude!"  
"Meh. Whatever." Ranma dismissed it and continued stumbling toward his room, not really caring about the extent of K's bizarre attraction to humans.  
"You know... she has it pretty bad for you," K said after a moment of silence, lightly slapping his tail against Ranma's shoulder in imitation of a suggestive nudge.  
"I can tell," the pigtailed boy responded, "and believe it or not, that's saying something." Ranma knew he was quite attractive to the opposite sex, but he also knew that he had a tendency not to think about women as women unless they were already naked or feeling him up. Not that he would admit to being dense, but it seemed to be a favorite word among those girls who grew frustrated with his inattention.  
Ranma sighed. "Look, a part of me would like nothing more than to go and... well, you know... but the rest of me knows that I **really** don't need that kind of a distraction right now."  
K shrugged. "The rest of the guys don't seem to let it bother them."  
"And THAT'S why they're throwing knives at big chunks of wood, whereas I'm setting things on fire with my mind." Ranma explained condescendingly.  
The metadragon winced. "Touche..."

Ranma finally reach the door to the room he shared with Tad, and K jumped down behind him.  
"Well, here we are. Home, stupid home..."  
Entering ahead of his draconian companion, Ranma noted that Tad was sitting on his bed with one leg in a cast and propped up on a chair in much the same position he had been loafing around in ever since the Shisou's resident female Ninja threw him out the window.  
The unbalanced trainee grinned upon seeing his roommate. "Hey Ranma, you wouldn't believe what I found today!"  
"You're probably right," Ranma said, "now shut up." He gestured toward K. "My dragon's gonna be crashing here tonight; you touch him, and you lose the other leg. Clear?"  
Tad blinked, then nodded. "Crystal. Now, about what I found-"  
"About that," Ranma interrupted, shambling over to his bed, "I don't care. Stop talking." He then fell forward onto his mattress, not even bothering to remove his weapons and light armor before getting into bed.  
"But Ranma, it's really cool!" Tad protested, struggling a bit to stand up.  
K suddenly shuddered involuntarily as he jumped up onto Ranma's bed, and began to look about nervously. Something in the room was making him uneasy, and if **he** was sensing something wrong, then it was only Ranma's complete exhaustion (or perhaps his familiarity with Tad) that was keeping the pigtailed boy from high alert.  
"Tad, I NEED to sleep! Tell me about it in the morning!" Ranma growled.  
The idiot Ninja pouted, but sat back down. "All right, fine. Though I think that Betty will want to introduce herself to you before then."  
"............" Ranma didn't move from his face-down position for several seconds, and then pushed himself up into a kneeling position. "God dammit..." He turned toward Tad, his left eye twitching. "Did you bring another undead spider here?"  
Tad grinned and nodded happily.  
"Erk!" K made a noise that sounded vaguely like a gasp, and Ranma turned to see that the tiny dragon was looking up at the ceiling above Ranma's bed, horrified.  
Without further fanfare, he looked straight up, not really surprised as he recognized the massive, eight-legged black shape that clung to the ceiling above his cot. With a legspan as wide as Ranma was tall, the deathcrawler's cloud gray eyes atop its head peered straight down at the vulnerable wanderer, and a bit of rotting flesh fell out of the large hole in the zombie spider's thorax, splattering messily on the edge of Ranma's blanket.  
"Isn't she cool?" Tad asked excitedly, "I found an adult this time!"  
"SCREEEEEEE!"  
"GYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!"

(Several weeks later)

Ranma let his breathing increase as he moved deeper and deeper into his kata, forcing his body to speed up without actually putting more force into his motions, and subtly shifting his stance to the proper form.  
Matsute nodded minutely, more out of habit than in any actual attempt at communication, and remained silent from where he observed the wanderer's progress.  
Ranma felt beads of sweat gather all over his body as his ki peaked to the critical point, and the heat surrounding him rose as a side effect of his Hyoken aura. Beyond the dragon's flame ki, Ranma stretched out his spirit beyond length of his body, willing his ki to tear itself apart and separate from its physical vessel.  
The visual result, as was apparent to the dozen or so Ninja standing at attention in the main dojo, wasn't quite so impressive, but very nearly so as Ranma's form faded and split into four semi-transparent images that slowly separated and slid away from each other, still holding the same position.  
"_Shadow split_!" Ranma shouted suddenly, causing three of the images to wink out of existence as the fourth barreled forward in a series of lightning-quick knife-hand strikes into an invisible enemy.  
"Hyah!" As the first image was still attacking, a second materialized to the right of the imaginary foe, approaching fast and striking in a high sweeping roundhouse that could have taken most people's head right off.  
The next two images both appeared at once, twin phantoms appearing from the rear of the imagined enemy and striking high and low at the same time.  
The whole time the first image struck tirelessly at the ghost opponent, flowing from a punching barrage to an elbow strike to a roundhouse in perfect time with the wraith Ranmas that struck from nowhere, and finally launching upward into a backflip kick.  
And then the first image disappeared.  
Gasps of surprise filled the dojo, and the various Ninja began to look around the room nervously, recalling that they hadn't bothered to track the other images that they had assumed to be complex ki bursts.

Matsute raised an eyebrow at the whole display, then smiled and shook his head. "Did not expect that. Is very good, Saotome."  
Behind the old Ninja master, Ranma smirked and slipped his hands into his pockets, feeling quite smug as the other Ninja in the room stared at him in surprise. "Heh. We're on even ground now, old man. The next time we fight, I'm gonna kick your ass!" Then he stopped and pretended to think about what he had just said. "Well, I'll kick it faster."  
"Arrogance refreshing when not combined with incompetence," Matsute said brightly, leading Ranma out of the dojo and away from the ring of stunned shinobi.  
"Yeah, well, being Tad's roommate helps the comparison," the pigtailed boy said sourly. "I mean, really, what was up with that whole resurrection attempt last Sunday?"  
Matuste nodded somberly. "Is true. Especially when he do such bad job killing you first. And then he act surprised when it fail."  
"That whole weekend was pretty messed up," Ranma muttered, unconsciously rubbing the spot on his chest where Tad had attempted to impale him with a golden banana.  
"Indeed," the Ninja master agreed, lowering his head, "ancient proverb say: 'Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned who happens to possess personal army of undead gorilla.' We lucky to get through that alive."  
The he patted Ranma on the back. "But enough! You do very good! Do Master proud! Come. I want give you something."  
Ranma blinked, but followed silently as the old man headed outside the main building and across the street to the broken-up store that lay opposite the office building used by the Shisou Ninja.  
Entering past the large, candle-stocked shrine that the majority of the structure had been converted into, the Ninja master continued on toward his personal quarters behind the shrine with his pupil in tow.  
"Saotome, I train many generation of Ninja. From long before war, I teach men and woman, boy and girl way of assassin, one who kill without detection in the service of master. I myself kill many old leader after World War II; people who fight change and bring chaos to preserve old ways to die by old ways. No have proverb, but is... appropriate in own way."  
Ranma, seeing that this was going to be one of those "old person looking back on troubled times" conversations, gave a silent prayer that it would be a short walk down memory lane and remained silent.  
"Generation after generation, I have pupil that meet or pass own skill. Ninja that kill small armies and survive to kill again. But always before, that all I end up with: assassins. Soulless killing machine without will of own, who give life for mission of taking it, with unquestioning loyalty to master in government; for killing machine without master is monster to be destroyed."  
He entered his room and looked up at the ceiling as Ranma stood in the doorway. "Death March change all that. Human killing human seem so petty, so pitiful now. And yet, now is time when assassin wanted most. Even amidst chaos of demon invasion, Empire want people killed in silence to keep power. And we do. Ninja do as have always done." He dropped his head and turned around. "Even now, when I leave Empire and come here, our ways not change. Only enemies do. We sneak in shadows and strike at foes from behind to break power of raiders and marauders. Even now, we not band together and fight our enemies to face. Is not our way." Finally, he smiled. "But it is **your** way."  
Ranma blinked. "Huh?"  
Without further explanation, the Ninja master walked up the mantle above his bedding and reached for the ornamental katana that was attached to it.  
Pulling the weapon off the wall, sheath and all, Matsute turned and tossed it to Ranma, who caught it easily. "Here. It yours."  
Ranma blinked, then sweatdropped. "Uh... thanks... I guess... isn't this your family blade?" The weapon was quite a bit heavier than a normal katana, and the hilt and upper handle had several heavy, semi-precious stones set in it. The sheath had Matsute's family crest carved thickly into it, and the whole blade looked poorly made and poorly aged. All in all, hardly a weapon that a respectable combat master would want hanging above his bed, much less a weapon that a wandering fighter would rely upon in combat.  
Matsute nodded. "Is indeed my family blade. Was handed down to great, great-grandfather long time ago, and have sheath made. Where sword come from is mystery."  
Ranma had to physically restrain his mouth with his free hand to keep from suggesting that it came from an arts & crafts workshop.  
A glance at Ranma told Matsute that he was planning on waiting until he was finished explaining the weapon (if the hand over his mouth was any indication), and so he continued. "If you look at blade, will notice symbols in red carved into the sword."  
Ranma frowned, then carefully unsheathed the weapon, afraid that rougher handling might cause the poorly forged item to snap. Indeed, there were vaguely Japanese-looking symbols along the sides of the chipped and heavily scratched blade, all of them painted in a curiously resilient reddish-brown paint. "Okay... what do they say?" He asked, assuming that the symbols were simply old kanji from his native language. Though he made an effort to keep the two thousand or so symbols that comprised the kanji writing system more or less memorized, and thus remain largely literate in his first language, there were still a good many he didn't know in common use, and he certainly didn't know any of the older ones that only had a place in historical texts.  
"No one know what they say," Matsute said, causing Ranma to raise an eyebrow. "When my great, great-grandfather accept blade from lord, he ask what it say. Lord say that his own ancestor once ask the man who gave sword to him, who ask the king that it come from, and so on. Nobody know."  
Then the Ninja master grinned. "Of course, real mystery is where one find mithril edge blade over thousand year before nexus open."  
Ranma started, surprised, then gazed at the weapon with a more cautious eye. "Mithril?"  
Matsute shrug. "Evon mystic say it mithril. Whatever it is, it magical. Sword look like decoration, but is very combat worthy, even now."  
"People actually USE this thing?" Ranma said, a hint of skepticism in his voice. Mithril or not, the edge looked dull, the blade was badly chipped, and the general forgework seemed to indicate that the weapon had been made for decoration.  
"Do not be fooled by sword appearance," Matsute warned, smirking. "Red color of symbols come from layer on layer of blood, hardened and dry, set and aged for so long that it become hard as blade itself."  
'That would be pretty impressive if the blade didn't look like it was going to fall apart at any moment.' Ranma thought, not wanting to actually complain to his master when he was being granted a free weapon. "So... why give this to **me**? I'm not even really a Ninja."  
"That why I give to you," the Ninja master explained simply.  
Ranma blinked. "Oh. That makes sense." 'Senile old twit.'  
Sitting down on his bed, Matsute motioned for Ranma to do the same.  
"Saotome, I meet and train many kind of man. Man who devote life, body, soul, and mind to perfecting art. Man who devote all to killing, and placing art as means to end. Man who fight with pure heart, refusing to kill. Man who take all power for self. Man who fight for money, man who fight for justice, man who fight for peace, and man who fight for pleasure. I meet all men like this, and know them like brothers. And yet, I never place blade in their hands."  
Then he leaned forward, and placed his hand on Ranma's shoulder. "Ranma. You nothing like any of these man. Yet you like all of them. I see within you a warrior, not just assassin. But one who not kill for any single purpose, or single master. One who would challenge world with own mind and power, and do what he think is best. You not aware of own power, or own importance. THAT why I give you blade. And you will need it."  
Ranma gazed upon the old master for a long moment, then clutched the katana close to him, stood, and bowed deeply. "Thank you, Master. I won't make you regret this."  
Matsute nodded, smiling slightly as Ranma straightened. "I know, Saotome." Then he walked past the pigtailed boy and stepped out into the shrine. "Other trainees going to village at edge of ruins today; you should go too. They have TV there, and it important for wanderer to keep track of events in world."  
"Sounds good to me," Ranma said, watching as Matsute left the shrine and walked out onto the street.  
Then he looked down at the katana that had been bestowed upon him, his gaze lingering on the dull shine of the large opal set into the middle of the sword's grip.  
"It's official: the old man's completely loopy," Ranma concluding, undoing his belt so that he could tie it to the sword sheathe. "At least he didn't quote another 'ancient proverb'..."

"All right! Time for some shore leave! Woo! Party time!"  
Ranma sweatdropped as he walked through the bazaar, the metadragon atop his head shouting excitedly and consequently drawing the entire street's attention toward him.  
"Uh, K? You've done nothing but loaf around the Ninja training ground since we got here," Ranma reminded his companion, "I mean, you've already been out here twice, even though I haven't."  
"Don't rain on my parade, Ninja boy!" K shouted, jumping off of Ranma and hovering in the air overhead. "Ooh! Ooh! Brass! I LOVE brass!!"  
"All right, all right. Cool it, metalhead." Ranma sighed and took out the meager amounts of cash he had gathered alongside his training through one-time jobs and private duels (a practice that Matsute firmly discouraged, but flourished nonetheless). "All right, just pick out something cheap and ugly-looking, all right?" He allowed, following his companion to a small stand that was selling cheap statues (such things had to be cheap, since most residents of ruin villages didn't have much to spare on decorative items).  
As K thanked him and began poking around at the various hunks of metal (the shopkeeper, obviously familiar with the metadragon, demanded that he not "taste" any), Ranma turned away and looked out over the relatively large village that had been carved out from the shattered remains of the old city. Many of the old office buildings had clothes or other items hanging from the window, and on the floors lower to the ground, the walls with holes in them had been build into extensions, with wooden balconies or small alcoves that hung over the street. In-between the sturdier skyscrapers, one could easily tell where a smaller or weaker building had collapsed, as there were flat patches of ground with small shacks made of wood or crudely patched-together walls of concrete and sheet metal.  
Looking around, it was easy to find what he was really looking for among the ramshackle shops. Certain stores made it a priority to secure goods from the American military trading posts that had been positioned in strategic points in the East, and thus sold a much more expensive and higher quality stock of supplies for the traveler who didn't want to skimp when his life may be on the line. While such shops were difficult to maintain and fairly rare (because often not enough people could afford higher quality goods), they were always easy to locate among the myriad of competing local shops.  
"Here you go." Ranma paid the vendor for his statue, and K happily took the small brass crescent moon up in his front talons before perching on Ranma's shoulder.  
"Where to next, chief?" The metadragon asked before biting off the tip of the statue.  
Ranma nodded his head over to the pristine white building set aside from the rest of the shops. "Next, we pick up some **good** stuff."  
K swallowed, then blinked. "As opposed to... bad stuff?"  
"As opposed to dragon food," Ranma said somewhat sourly. He still hadn't forgotten losing most of his best gear to K's unusual appetite.  
As Ranma approached the quality shop, more differences between it and the ragtag stores around it became obvious. The material of the building, rather than being plain or even well-prepared wood, looked like concrete but had a smooth, white texture to it. The corners of the structure, which were smoothly rounded rather than straight and angled, had clearly defined seams that held together tightly to keep the walls together. All in all, it looked as if it had been assembled from a kit rather than having been built.  
Entering through the metal panel door, Ranma took one look at the interior and smiled.

The shopkeeper looked up as the bell attached to the door rang, and he grinned as a young man he had never seen before entered with some sort of silvery lizard on his shoulder. Unfamiliar customers were always a good sign in his business; travelers had greater need for durable, reliable supplies, and tended to have more money to burn than the small businessmen in the ruin village.  
"Well hello there son! What can I do for you?"  
Smiling, Ranma walked straight up to the counter, slowly withdrew his Nighthawk pistol (so as not to alarm the man), and then placed it on the counter.  
"I need some .50 caliber clips, some binoculars, a heavy med pack, and a standard mess kit. Also, I'd like to know about any mithril forges you know about around here."  
The shopkeep, trying to ignore the sight of K munching on a brass statue, raised his eyebrow as he looked at Ranma's gun. "You know, I have to admit, when you came in, you struck me as one of those Shisou fellas."  
Ranma blinked. "I am. Why?"  
The shopkeep raised his eyebrow. "Son, I only know of a few Ninja who use guns, and those that do at least use ones that can be fitted with silencers."  
Ranma just shrugged. "I figure if the bullet is too big for a silencer to work, it's big enough that it doesn't matter in the long run."  
"....................." The owner stared at the pigtailed boy for a long while, unable to come up with a suitable response to that.  
"So... my stuff?"  
Snapping out of the daze, the shopkeeper quickly responded. "Uh, yeah! No problem. Well, at least for the supplies. I'm afraid you won't find any mithril forges around here." Then he leaned forward, smiling slightly. "Although... I do happen to have some 'special' stock of these .50 cal slugs. Not mithril, but some cheaper alloy that's almost as good. Give ya a real nice price on it, too."  
Ranma rolled his eyes, recognizing the pitch that he had heard a thousand times before, applied to all manner of item. "That sounds pretty good, but I'm a little short of cash." He glared down at K as he continued addressing the shopkeeper. "My dragon ate all my gold."  
K swallowed the last of his brass, and then gave Ranma an annoyed glance. "Hey! I **said** I was sorry!"  
"Ah... oh." The owner of the store didn't really know how to address such a situation, so he eventually decided to ignore the exchange. "All right. I'm gonna have to duck into the back to get your ammo. Just a minute."

As the owner left for the back, K hopped off of Ranma's shoulder onto the main counter, feeling slightly intoxicated from the mixture of metals he had just eaten.  
"Whoa! Check it out! Is that a real television?"  
Ranma raised an eyebrow, then nodded as he took note of the device hanging from the ceiling above a display of combat knives.  
"Yes it is. These little shops are made with supply kits purchased from the American trading posts; they have small generators and everything."  
Seeing that the program was tuned to a American satellite news network, Ranma reached up and turned up the volume.  
-And so far the movie industry has **continued** to take repeated hits from networks and studios releasing dedicated documentaries of post-war China and Russia, culminating in the third and final Lord of the Rings movie netting less than five million dollars worldwide two weeks after its release. Likewise, Dawn of the Dead suffered as well, as one reviewer claimed they had seen much better scripted zombie attacks on the Nature Channel.  
"It's kind of uncomfortable to think that the wastes are weirder than Hollywood," Ranma said uneasily, not particularly interested in the information, but having nothing better to do while he waited. Luckily he was mostly fluent in common English from his travels, and didn't have too much trouble following the broadcast.  
K shrugged. "I hear it's still less brutal out here than in Manhattan."  
"That's not saying much, K."  
In political news, President Bush participated in his first debate earlier today against his political rivals for the presidency in 2004: Senator John Kerry, of the Democratic party, and Grim... Grimtah... Grimtah? Grimtal? It's Grimtal, right? Forget that last name, I'm not touching ANYTHING with an apostrophe in the middle of it!  
Ranma and K sweatdropped. On the TV, the screen split into two images, one presenting two news anchors, and the other presenting a recorded image of one of the candidates responding to a question.  
I know better than to judge a candidate by his looks Todd, but I have to say that Grimtal's absolutely REPULSIVE image didn't do him any favors tonight. Flesh hanging on his face in long, rotten strips with a smile that looks almost painful to present, that lich looks **anything** but presidential.  
...... Uh, Bob, that's Kerry, not Grimtal.  
Ranma and K each sweatdropped again.  
"Are human politics always like this?" The metadragon asked curiously.  
"No way," Ranma responded immediately, "this election is going WAY better than they usually do."  
Er... of course! I knew that! I wasn't referring to THIS clip in particular, it's just... well...  
The anchorman cleared his throat.  
Well, Grimtal didn't get off to a good start in the debates at all; while his decisive answers appealed to some Americans, his damnation of all who oppose him and his insistence that all of humanity enter a new age of horror and suffering just didn't **connect** with the voters.  
Besides that, his image suffered significantly when John Kerry angered him, and he responded by draining the senator's soul and causing it to burst into hellflame. Not a very professional image.  
Never mind that it didn't have any tangible effect on Senator Kerry at all; he didn't even stop talking.  
Click!  
Ranma pulled his hand away from the television as his other held his forehead, trying to stave off a headache. "Okay... that's quite enough of that..."  
At that moment the shopkeep reappeared carrying a crate.  
"All right son, I'm gonna make you a deal," the man dropped the crate on the counter, then withdrew several pistol clips along with the rest of the items Ranma requested. "Five twelve-round clips, plus the other stuff for an even $200."  
"Grk!" Ranma immediately choked and stumbled backward, indicating that the offered price was not satisfactory. "Give me a break! I still have to eat, you know!" Then he stood up straight and looked considerate. "Hmmm...... I'll give you $100."  
In one swipe of his hand, the shopkeeper scooped up the ammunition and dropped it in the box, leaving only the non-combat items.  
"Hey, hey, hey! I need that stuff to kill people!" Ranma protested loudly.  
The owner shook his head. "Look son, that kind of firepower 'aint cheap. You look like you've seen your fair share of the road; it's rough out there. Now I take care of myself by selling you this gear, and you take care of **your**self by using this gear. That's just how it works, see?"  
Ranma stared at the man for a moment in silence. "That doesn't really help me any."  
The shopkeep sighed. "All right, look. You have anything you wanna pawn? That's a pretty nice piece; I'll trade you a cheaper gun for it, and you'll have a much easier time finding ammo." Seeing Ranma shake his head, the man gestured toward his gauntlet. "How 'bout the glove? Looks like it'd only get in your way, and it's flashy to boot. That'll sell for a lot to the right people."  
Ranma stared down at the mysterious gauntlet, considering it. "...... Nah. This thing's saved my life a couple times. I should at least go through the trouble of finding out what the heck it is before I sell it off for a few bullets."  
Then the pigtailed boy rubbed his chin in consideration. "Say, old man..." he leaned forward slightly, and the shopkeep raised his eyebrow and leaned forward as well.  
Then Ranma smirked. "What'll you give me for the metal lizard?"  
"HEY!!"

Sigh "Two lousy clips, and no binoculars... damn overpriced foreign goods..." Ranma murmured sourly, walking out of the shop with his backpack slung over one shoulder.  
K followed, looking rather cross as he crawled along the ground after his companion. "You weren't really considering selling me... were you?"  
Ranma snorted. "Not for fifteen bucks! Hell, after all the money in eaten supplies and weapons I've spent on you so far, I'm not going to pawn you for two digit figures!"  
K's eye twitched, but he managed to hold his tongue as he recognized that he was largely responsible for Ranma's lack of traveling gear.  
"Ranma! There you are!" Ninja and dragon turned toward Natalie's voice, and Ranma waved to her as the bouncy trainee jogged over to them.  
"What's up? Did Tad get stuck in the well again?" He asked.  
Natalie sighed. "No, not this time."  
"Damn. Well, then what's wrong?"  
The female Ninja looked appropriately embarrassed as she explained. "Well, I've never been to the village with Kim before, and he asked me a while ago if he could borrow some money for a present for his girlfriend."  
Ranma blinked, recalling the name of the trainee who had taunted him upon his first meeting with the Shisou. "KIM has a girlfriend? That loser?"  
Natalie sweatdropped. "Well, no. I was surprised, but I believed him and lent him the money. Then I talked to Chang about it, and he told me that apparently Kim is quite familiar with the local tavern around here..."  
"Ah, I see," Ranma muttered, crossing his arms over his chest. "So, what, you need me to go in there and get your money back the hard way?"  
"Oh, no, I can do that on my own," Natalie insisted, "it's just that Chang said that some pretty rough customers can come through here, and Kim has a knack for... finding them. He suggested I have some backup in case he gets into trouble."  
BWAM!! Ranma raised an eyebrow as a body flew through the wall of a building a little ways off behind Natalie, crashing through the wooden barrier and continuing on to roll to the other side of the street.  
"Too late."

Kim grimaced as he fought to get to his feet, the vertigo from having been smashed harder than he had ever been in his life mixing with the vertigo from drinking four whiskey shots in as many minutes.  
He was vaguely aware of the sound of heavy footsteps coming from the direction from which he had flown, and rolled onto his rear so that he could at least see his antagonist before he got beaten up again.

K groaned, and Ranma held his face in his hands.  
"Oh, mother of Charon..."  
"Not THAT guy again!"  
Natalie blinked, then took another good look at the large, imposing man wearing a trenchcoat with a broadsword strapped to his back. "You know that man?"  
Ranma sighed. "We've tried to kill each other before, yeah."  
The female trainee looked alarmed, and immediately withdrew her main daggers. "Is he evil?"  
"The jury's still out on that one," K said sourly. "We can tell ya he's a nut, and a damn strong nut, but that's about it."

Rayden stared down at the Korean Ninja, and his frown deepened as he teetered slowly from side to side.  
"Ya know," the dark paladin slurred, raising a finger to point at the downed man, "in mah natif culcha, I wou' get tah kill yoo fah sayin' dat abou' mah momma..."  
Kim almost doubled over in pain as he tried to scatter away. "B-But I didn't s-say anything about your mother!"  
"Ah kno tha'!" Rayden admitted, pointing unsteadily at the trainee. "Bu' when ahm this was'ed, I gif da same speesh tah e'eryone who piz me off!"  
"G-G-Get away from me, you FREAK!!" Kim shouted, scooting away in a panic.  
The demon hunter scoffed, and casually withdrew a beer from the inner folds of his trench coat while he aimed the palm of his free hand at the socially inept shinobi. "Well, THA' was jus' rood!"  
Brzack! A short arc of black lightning flashed around his free hand, and Kim's eyes widened as a sphere of dark energy coalesced into the man's palm.  
Glug Glug Glug Rayden took several large gulps from his beverage, then wiped his mouth with his sleeve and returned his attention to the frantically retreating Ninja. "Hic! Die!"  
Thwack! The attack hardly went as expected as a flying roundhouse suddenly struck him in the side of the head and sent him flying into a collection of trashed cars next to the main road, causing him not only a great deal of pain, but also causing the energy charge in his hand to instantly disperse.  
Shaking his head as he got to his feet, Rayden's vision suddenly snapped back to normal, and the ringing in his ears stopped.  
"Aw, great! My buzz is gone!"  
Then he turned toward the source of the kick, and he blinked in surprise.  
"Hey! Didn't you kick my ass once?"  
Ranma smirked. "I would've kicked it twice, but we were kind of pressed for time in Phoenix Mountain. See you're still alive, though."  
"Hmph." Rayden jabbed a thumb at Kim, who had managed to stand up but was still too badly hurt to run away. "This jerk a friend of yours? He asks to hear a few of my stories, has a bunch of drinks with me, then tries to sneak out and leave me with the tab!"  
Ranma blinked, then smiled. "Perfect! Then he can give Natalie her money back!"  
"Hey!" A vein popped up on Rayden's head. "I 'aint paying his tab!"  
"That isn't my problem," Ranma said, shrugging nonchalantly. "Though if you want to settle the bill, I'll fight you for it."  
Seeing the pigtailed boy grin, Rayden nodded seriously, and then undid the strap connecting his sword to his body.  
"Whoa, wait!" K shouted from a safe distance away, next to Natalie. "You're actually going to fight him? HERE?!"  
Rayden shrugged, eyeing his opponent with a far more calculating look than he did last time. "Why not?"  
"Well, for one thing, last time you got owned," Ranma explained, scratching his head in irritation. "And SINCE then, I've been constantly training to make myself twice as fast and deadly as before. You don't stand a chance!"  
"I do not fight for the spoils of victory," Rayden said, suddenly sounding far more serious and wise as he withdrew his broadsword, holding it in his right hand while he held his sheath in his left, "I fight for the purity of blood shed in combat. I fight for the end."  
"..............." Ranma remained silent, not taking up his own stance. "Whatever man, you're going to get beaten down again."  
"I don't mind losing," the dark paladin shouted, dashing forward suddenly, "TO A WORTHY OPPONENT!!"

"Hmmm... zo he'z here. I can zenze it." Leia smiled slightly as she looked down at the shattered city below, her keen eyes picking up subtle signs of inhabitation among the wall of desolate, broken structures that would have led most to believe no civilization existed within.  
"Vith luck za human zat vas vith him iz ztill here. Za question of courze, iz vether or not to zimply vipe out ze entire village, or to inviltrate ond make zure zat ze dragon doez not ezcape."  
Her smile turning into a grin, the tall, unnaturally thin blue-haired woman gently raised a hand and blew on her index finger, causing a cloudy stream of shining blue dust to flow from her mouth and gather into a pinprick of white light on the tip of her finger.  
Then she turned toward one of the larger rocks that lay on the top of the hill beside her. "I do not like to talk to myzelf, you know. Vy don't you come out, ond ve can dizcuzz any reazonz vy I shouldn't kill you."  
There was only a moment of hesitation before a Ninja, dressed in the traditional black mission outfit, rose up from behind the rock that seemed way too small to hide him as well as it did.  
"We are a peaceful people, demon. Peaceful, poor, and far too organized to wipe out easily. I can assure you, an attack upon our villages is far more trouble than it's worth."  
Leia's eye twitched, and she brushed a hand back. "You... You DARE call ME a demon? You vould do vell not to miztake vuhn of ze zerpent kingz for zuch filthy monzterz." Then her eyes narrowed. "It can be... hazardouz to your health." And with that, she flicked her finger at the investigating assassin.  
The Ninja, knowing that whatever she was doing was an attack, moved slightly out of the way of the path of the pinnacle of light, preparing his own weapons as his stance shifted ever so slightly.  
Shink!  
Then his eyes widened as the small point of magic exploded into a cone of large, razor-sharp icicles that barrelled toward him with such speed and an area of effect that he couldn't possibly dodge.

Leia smirked as the wave of blue and white burst outward, followed promptly by a wave of red. Then the snow dragon slowly walked up to the neatly-cut corpse of the assassin and waved a hand over it, causing the cleanly sliced strips of muscle and flesh to freeze until they were of proper consistency.  
"Hmmm... if ze humanz inzizt on delivering my mealz, zen maybe I vill spare zeir village after all." Her mission only consisted of recovering the stolen dragon and gauntlet and to kill the thief. And she had been warned that the humans of this particular area were considered quite dangerous.  
Crunch! Picking up a strip of what used to be the Ninja's arm, Leia bit into it with fervor, breaking off a large, frozen chunk and savoring the rough texture before swallowing the hardened meat.  
"I don't know vy, but for zome reazon... humanz alvays tazte better ven in human form." Shrugging to herself, she took another bite out of the arm.  
She really did hope that the thief was younger than this man. She always did like her meat... tender.

End Chapter 6 


	7. Breaking the Ice

A Study on Dragons:  
The draconic race.  
A race, it is said, that is most closely related to divinity. A class of beast likened to Gods.  
Is there any greater ally than the mighty serpent kings? Physically powerful, granted with a near-impervious hide. Born with natural abilities that transcend traditional understanding of mana. Gifted in the art of magic, and adept at certain spells that leave most mages dizzy with wonder. Intelligent. Strong. Clever. Wise... or relatively so.  
Dragons are the most sought-after allies in war, and for good reason. With their strength, skill, and cunning, a single draconian can wipe out even a force that exceeds it in power-and what a mighty force that must be-using the strategy of ambush and surprise. Which are not typical tactics of the dragon, but ones that it is well-suited for. Because of this, some dragons take on the role of mercenaries, fighting for gold and seeking out treasures just as any visalen rogue (but with a much higher degree of success). Others obtain titles of nobility from demon and elfin lords and take roles as knights and protectors in return for vast sums and the promise of many luxuries. Others are bound to religion, and perform duties according to their sect. The Dark Brotherhoods gladly accept the help of dragons seeking conversion and service to the Dark Eternals, and these draconians are, as one would expect, quite prone to promotion and high stature within their fold.  
My fascination, as usual, begins with their genealogy. Dragon nests and cities are where one can find the most examples of successful genetic crossbreeding, for the wonderful diversity of the dragon races offer a multitude of studies and experimental possibilities for creating even more powerful hybrids!  
Of course, therein lies the problem. Dragons are powerful. Intelligent. Difficult to manipulate. Very vengeful if betrayed. And not overly fond of demons as a whole. I simply could not risk entering a draconic city, no matter what precautions I've taken beforehand; no matter how my curiosity beats at my common sense, the result is the same.  
I've managed to conduct studies from afar by remotely controlling the minds of humanoid slaves they keep around the cities. What I've found is truly fascinating, and I've mostly discontinued my research for fear I would become to enthralled by my success such that I take too many risks and make a mistake.  
It took many, MANY slaves, the vast majority of which were detected by some magical sensitivity and destroyed, but I've managed to get a great deal of data on draconic culture, intercourse, and basic genetic types. It would seem the natural, base order of dragons follows the basic pattern of elemental mana: red, blue, yellow, green, brown, black, and white. These correspond, respectively, to fire, water, lightning, wind, earth, darkness, and light. Through untold cross-unions between species, we've come to have dragons that combine different elements. Some examples are Gold Dragons, Terradragons, Stormdragons, Metadragons, Shard Dragons, and Magma Dragons. Some have toyed incessantly with the powers of necromancy and become Skull Dragons and Phantom Dragons. These species are further noted by a class, a general power pedigree if you will, such as "common", "lord", "adept", and "imperial". Such an oddity, for a race universally declared as rare and endangered to be blessed with such a diverse population!  
But alas, my studies of these fantastic creatures are doomed to inefficiency unless I can secure a reliable means of controlling or manipulating them. Such things are rumored to exist, but their existence lies in the same vein as tales of the Creator Ancients walking the realms again as men. I would not be surprised if such a thing did exist to bind the will of the Serpent Kings to your own, but I dare not waste my own time and resources searching for a prize so wrapped in mystery and fable.  
One VERY odd fact I found that isn't mentioned in any other study of dragons that I've ever seen: there is a relatively high number of half-dragon, half-human hybrids living in the city amongst the full dragons and mostly human slaves. Who'd have thought?  
- Entry #371 of Doppler Thaeramon's personal scientific journal

Nexus II  
by Black Dragon  
http: New Republic Commando demo rox! I am SO gonna get that game! And Empire at War too! I can't wait!  
I wonder how long it's been since I did a legally significant disclaimer...

" " human languages, " " demonic languages or languages different than the one in common use in a given scene, writing, ( ) smart-ass author comments, sounds.  
If I don't happen to mention which language in particular is being spoken, then it's not important anyway.

Chapter 7  
Breaking the Ice

Whaboom!  
Natalie held her arm up to her face to keep the dust out of her eyes as she struggled to drag Kim to safety among the village carved from the city ruins, just meters away from the dome of expanding darkness that tore apart the dirt road.  
All around, people peeked out at the scene from behind windows and around barriers, trying to get a good look while staying as far away from the danger as possible. It was really a wonder they stuck around at all; while two swordsmen throwing energy blasts around in the street was more common than most people would prefer, usually it was not very well contained. Most would have been running to get the local peace enforcers if they hadn't been aware that three Shisou Ninja were already present, with two more elsewhere in the city.

As the dust cleared from his last attack, Rayden homed in on Ranma's aura and struck with a vicious slashing charge, hoping that the dirt kicked up by the energy bomb had blinded his foe.  
It appeared to be wishful thinking, as nothing but dust and Earth parted before the blade of his sword. Then the demon hunter felt a sharp pressure on his back as Ranma kicked off of it behind him, and Rayden turned around, charging more dark energy in his hand.  
"Eat it and die!" Rayden's arm shook slightly as each black, sparkling sphere of destructive power launched from his palm, not unlike the recoil of a cannon.  
Ranma's image darted from side to side as he avoided the dark bomblets, moving backward the whole time as he dodged the projectiles and eventual detonations with ease.  
"That the best you got!" Ranma taunted. "I'll do you a favor and level the playing field a little! Let's make this a sword fight!"

Unstrapping the sheath attacked to his waist, he brought the sheathed katana before him, and held it up as he gripped the handle and slowly withdrew the blade.  
Rayden watched patiently, and then sweatdropped. Ranma's sword was... ragged-looking, to say the least. The blade was chipped, the edge was dull, there were streaks of dirt and rust along the flat side, and what was visible between the ugly stains was marred with tarnish.  
"Did you get that weapon at a yard sale, or what?" Rayden said critically, his eyes narrowing. "I've seen broken sticks more useable than that thing!"  
"It was a gift given to me by a senile old man," Ranma explained, admiring the blade as if there something about it worth admiring.  
K, who was sitting next to Natalie, sweatdropped. "It's not nice to call your Ninja master senile... no matter how accurate it is."  
"Whatever," Ranma said dismissively, smirking. Then he fell into a ready stance. "Maybe I'm just using this weapon to show you how little I think of you as a fighter."  
A vein popped up on Rayden's head as he shook a fist at the cocky Ninja. "HEY! You think you can take me lightly! I'll rip you apart!"  
Ranma grinned and licked his lips. "That's right... get nice 'n mad..."

Brzzt! Arcs of black lightning began to crawl over Rayden's arms and shoulders, and a dark, misty haze gathered around him as his aura built.  
"You won't beat me so easy! _Shadow break_!" The demon hunter's aura gathered in his palm, and he thrust his fist toward Ranma, the dark mana expanding outward and drilling into the ground as it formed an energy wave.  
"Hmph. Couldn't try harder than that?" Ranma zipped to the side as the wave of dark mana smashed through the street, digging a wide trench in the packed dirt and rubble that made up the road.  
Rayden waved some dust out of the way and backed up, trying to locate his opponent through the smoke screen he had himself kicked up.  
"Your power is impressive. VERY impressive, actually. But that's pretty much all there is to you, huh?"  
The demon hunter whirled around, and then grit his teeth as he saw his opponent standing calmly behind him, inspecting his katana casually.  
"No skill, no speed, no brains. Just big muscles, a big sword, and a big aura."  
"What's it to ya, human?" Rayden sneered, bringing Darkrune about so that he was in a ready position.  
'I knew it! He's not human!' K thought, nodding sharply. Truth be told, the aura and near-invulnerability kind of gave it away, but then, traveling with Ranma had forced the metadragon to re-evaluate his opinion of human combat potential.  
Ranma swung his sword back and forth, as if he was practicing a golf windup. "You are SO far out of your league. I mean, you're good, but you're just not good enough, you know? It would be easier on everyone, especially yourself, if you just gave up now."  
"I DON'T give up!" Rayden shouted, dashing forward and slashing diagonally.  
Ranma dodged to the side away from the attack, and reached Rayden's exposed flank with ease, and struck with a strong horizontal slash.  
He expected Rayden's body to give quite a bit of resistance, if his katana did not break outright on the other man's skin, but was pleasantly surprised as he felt the edge sink past the clothing and into the flesh beneath the left arm, breaking skin about as easily as he had with his former weapon.  
'Then again, that sword didn't do a whole lot of damage to him either,' Ranma thought, pulling his blade free and hopping back to avoid Rayden's counterattack.  
Rayden slashed fiercely to the side, and then fell quickly off balance as searing agony enveloped his side.  
Ranma blinked as his foe shouted in surprised, and then fell onto one knee, holding his wound as blood spilled freely through the cuts in his coat and underlying shirt.  
The wanderer blinked again as Rayden pushed himself back up quickly and into a battle stance, eyeing Ranma's weapon with sudden confusion and respect.  
Ranma did the same, and frowned at his katana's rusted, tarnished blade. 'THIS broken-up piece of junk did THAT to him? You've gotta be kidding me!'  
Turning toward the adjacent wall of a building, Ranma carelessly slashed his weapon across it experimentally.  
Shrak! A rain of gravel blasted out of the wall from the deep gouge Ranma's katana left, and the wanderer planted his fists on his hips and grinned proudly at the achievement. "Wow! This thing really is useful!"  
Rayden, for his part, snorted and wiped off the area of his wound. "Hmph. My sword can do that."  
"Yeah, well, your sword LOOKS like it can do that," Ranma explained, moving into another ready stance, "Mine, on the other hand, looks like it could fall apart if you breathed on it too roughly."  
Ranma started to jog forward, and then dashed back as his foe lashed out with a strong downward stroke.  
'Too easy...' Ranma made to cut at Rayden's unprotected torso, but was surprised when his attack was effectively blocked in time. 'Huh. Guy's faster than he looks... with the sword, at least...'  
Shtang! Chingk! Ranma jumped to the side and lashed out with two more attacks, each of which were deftly deflected by the magic greatsword.  
Then he noticed that Rayden was glowing again, and opted for a quick withdraw.  
"_RED BLITZKRIEG_!" The demon hunter's aura burst as he began lashing out in a lightning-fast series of diagonal slashes digging a long trail of messy ruts into the dirt road, and eventually smashing a large hole in the wall of the building he had been facing, ripping through the surface concrete with ease.  
Rayden growled as he turned away from the damaged structure, and scanned the area for his opponent, ignoring the people now actively seeking shelter from the battle.  
'That's impossible! He was right in front of me! How'd he-'  
His musings were cut short as he felt a heavy pressure on his back.  
"Ya missed me."  
SHANG! Ranma flipped off of Rayden's back as the demon hunter's blade burned through the space he had just occupied, singing its shrill song of bloodshed as it sliced through the air in a wide arc of black energy.  
"Too slow..." Ranma touched ground before Rayden had finished his swing, and the pigtailed boy positioned his katana so that it pointed straight forward. "WAY. TOO. SLOW."  
Shwick! "Graugh!" Rayden gasped in surprised as Ranma's blade pierced his abdomen, digging through skin and organs to burst out the paladin's backside.  
Whoosh! Ranma jerked his head to the side, allowing Rayden's countering haymaker to pass by his head harmlessly. "Heh. I learned a lot the last time we fought." That said, he planted his foot on Rayden's chest and pushed off hard, ripping his katana free of the man's insides.  
Rayden grunted and stepped backward, building energy even as blood and less common fluids flowed freely down his coat. "_Burial_!"  
Ranma dashed backward as the streaks of black magic surged toward him, and then jumped backward onto the wall of a building, jumping off again as the same wall was torn up along the ground.  
Still trying to hold his guts in place, Rayden tried to track the smaller man, but quickly lost sight of him as the Ninja zipped back and forth in the air among the buildings.  
"Geez... you really have gotten better, huh?" The demon hunter tried to gather his power again, but grimaced as he felt his energy reserves dip even further. 'Damn! That katana has some sort of light enchantment on it! With Darkrune still sealed...'  
"Yes. I have gotten better."  
Rayden turned and thrust his sword straight toward the source of the voice, putting the last of his mana reserves into a final burst of dark energy.  
"... But you haven't," Ranma finished, grinning as his image seemed to split into two, with the greatsword stabbing between them. Both Ranmas' left fists glowed with power as their fire auras gathered into their hands.  
"_Dragon fist_!" Kra-KOOOOOM!  
Rayden blanched as he was pounded on both sides by bursts of intense power, crushing his weakened body with severe impact force before engulfing it in Ranma's fiery aura.  
'This... This is unreal...' Rayden thought, staggering down onto his knees as he began to lose track of his surroundings. 'Never seen moves... like that, never... how can... just a... human?'  
His hardwired combat senses, still trying to keep a bead on the situation despite his body failing, noted that there was another gathered concentrated energy source coming from above and dropping toward him fast.  
'I lost? To a... a human?'  
Kakroom!

"Is... Is it over?" Natalie asked timidly, looking worriedly at the cloud of dust that had been blown outward from the bursts of flame.  
"Oh, it's over," K said, not nearly as tense as she was as the female Ninja held him tightly against her chest. "Getting hit, cut, impaled, and then slammed with three _dragon fists_? That guy's down, if not dead."  
"I would count on him surviving," Ranma said, stepping out of the rapidly clearing dust cloud, and patting himself down as he approached. "That guy's way too tough. Not nearly as good a fighter as I am... but WAY too tough." The wanderer frowned. It had taken one dragon fist to annihilate the hammaku back in China. It had taken three to bring down the weakened and half-drunk swordsman. 'What is this guy made of? His body gave the sword more resistance than that concrete wall did!'  
Natalie let out a breath of relief, and then put K down, much to his disappointment. "I have to inform the Master of this immediately! This man could be part of a remnant army or a bandit group!"  
"Doubt it," Ranma said, turning around and observing the insensate body (which was still on fire). "I've met him before. He travels alone, and seems to prefer killing things that don't have money."  
"Even so, Matsute should be informed! We will also need to prepare a proper cell for the miscreant!" The female Ninja took off to leave, but was unexpectably stopped when the man at her feet grabbed her leg.  
"W-Wait! Don't leave me here! Please!" Kim shouted, scooting closer so that he could get a better grip on the girl's leg.  
"Hey! Get off of-HEY! Don't touch me, you little..." She trailed off incoherently as she yanked her leg free of the wounded Ninja, and then gave the man an angry kick in the stomach, causing K and Ranma to wince. "Idiot! This is all your fault in the first place! You can just stay here until help arrives!"  
Leaving her Ninja companion curled up in a fetal position, Natalie took off toward the main Shisou compound, not bothering to wait for Ranma or K.

"So what do you think we should do now?" K asked, finally tearing his gaze away from Natalie's rear. He had no idea why female Ninja outfits incorporated ultra-tight miniskirts, but he couldn't argue with the results.  
"Well, **I'm** gonna take this guy's cash and pay the barkeep," Ranma said, digging through the demon hunter's pockets. "Feel free to eat any metal on him... hmm?" Ranma found a large, smooth object on the inside of Rayden's coat (after he had put the fire out, of course), and was somewhat surprised when he pulled out a small glass flask of brandy. "Huh. How do you think this survived getting shattered? Weird."  
Ranma continued digging through the various objects stored within the torn, bloody, and burnt trench coat, pulling each one out and setting it in a pile nearby.  
"More brandy... scotch... beer... rum... more beer... yeesh. This guy is one serious alcoholic." Ranma looked at the growing pile of bottles in disgust, and then went back to digging in the man's coat, deciding not to bother with anything else that felt like a bottle, and also deciding not to bother wondering how so many bottles could have fit inside the coat alongside someone with Rayden's build. Nevermind that none of them had broken while the larger man was being beaten about like a punching bag.  
"Huh. These are interesting." Ranma pulled out two blocky-looking, oversized handguns, and placed them on the ground next to him. "Pistols... obviously Earth technology, but not any design I recognize." He carefully picked up the item and observed it from all angles, careful to never point the weapon where it might discharge and hurt someone. "Dang. Those are big bullets. Glad he didn't pull these out." Ranma may have been able to dodge bullets, but they were far from his favorite obstacle to deal with. Also, guns had a way of leveling the playing field more than he would have liked. Much better to face someone who could only toss energy bolts that move at about the same rate as thrown rocks.  
"Next up... wallet! Yes!" Ranma pulled out the small sack and opened it, pleasantly surprised to find a small assortment of high-value currency within. "Gems, a few gold coins, some American coins, fifty dollar bills... hm? These are odd." Ranma pulled out a thin coin that looked very different from the rest; it was made mostly of a shiny black material, was square with a dull point extending from each flat side, and had a dull green gem set in the middle. "Whassis?"  
"It's a tand coin," K said immediately, eyeing Rayden more carefully. "It's a unit of currency minted in Dark Brotherhood cathedrals, and are pretty common on Brotherhood-dominated realms, as well as Hellplanes and other places where demons are the primary race."  
Ranma frowned. "Would it be worth anything here?"  
"Maybe, but not to most people," K said uneasily. "There are no Brotherhood elements here. Well... except for this guy, I think."  
Ranma blinked. "Say what?"  
K waddled over to the insensate demon hunter and poked the man's chest. Embroidered on the left breast of the trench coat were three parallel slash marks with a half-circle arcing away behind them, and a hole in the middle of the arc. "I was right. This crest is Third Brotherhood."  
Ranma blinked again. "Third Brotherhood?"  
The metadragon sighed, apparently exasperated from having to share some tidbit of information that everyone in the multiverse should know. "The Third Brotherhood is the dark cult dedicated to the Ancient of Destruction known as Kharak. They're one of the more powerful Brotherhoods militarily, or used to be anyway, and train their paladins to be 'dread knights': powerful, bloodthirsty solider mercenaries who use magic for the sole purpose of maximum devastation. They revere death, especially through combat, and are constantly at war with the First Brotherhood, with whom they're ideologically opposed."  
Ranma stared at K blankly. "Oh-kay... and the First Brotherhood is...?"  
"They worship Menos, the Ancient of Death," K said, rolling his eyes.  
The pigtailed warrior nodded thoughtfully. "I don't get it." Then he shrugged. "If these carrot guys worship death, and these melon guys worship death, why do they fight?"  
K would have slapped a hand over his forehead if it had been a feasible gesture for his body structure. "The followers of MENOS worship death, but their faith is represented through the raising of the dead as undead. They literally worship and empower dead beings. The followers of KHARAK, by contrast, worship destruction, and revere death in the sense of... well... you know, the living getting stabbed until they stop moving." The metadragon sweatdropped a little, but was at least reassured that the explanation didn't go over Ranma's head. "To the Third Brotherhood, raising the dead in either the practice of necromancy or full resurrection is an insult to the sanctity and peace offered by a creature's destruction, and seek to wipe it out wherever they find it."  
"Great. Homicidal religious fanatics," Ranma murmured irritably, taking the small sack of currency. "As if we didn't have enough of those BEFORE you guys showed up." Then he began to put the demon hunter's pistols back in his coat.  
Deciding to leave the alcohol where it laid, Ranma entered the bar and handed the entire purse to the barkeep, not bothering to listen to the man's stuttered thanks or his requests to know just what had happened outside (apparently he had been hiding behind the bar counter or something).  
By the time he had gotten back to the battle site, K had already found some kind of metal block, probably an ammo clip for the pistols, to gnaw on. Ranma ignored him, pleased that the metadragon was eating somebody else's gear for once.  
Planting his fists on his hips, Ranma surveyed the scene. There was extensive damage to the surroundings, but oddly enough, the demon hunter had avoided throwing any of the bigger energy bolts at the populated buildings. The relatively small ground-based wave had taken a sizable chunk out of that apartment structure, but on the whole the damage was entirely fixable.  
"And then there's this thing..." Ranma looked at the dark greatsword lying on the ground a couple meters from Rayden's body, having been flung away by the sheer concussive force of the dragon fist. It didn't appear to be constructed of any metal Ranma could identify, but he had seen enough magical artifacts such that that didn't really mean anything to the pigtailed man.  
Whatever it was though, it was radiating some kind of power beyond mere magic. His ki senses allowed him to detect active magic, but in a round-about, inefficient way that mostly involved looking at the flows of natural energies and weeding out small irregularities that seemed to have no other explanation. A technique he rarely had to use, as he usually either dealt with magic that entered the visible spectrum as it was flung at him in some cohesive energy bolt, or avoided it entirely. No sense messing with the powers beyond your understanding, and all that.  
The sword was different, though. The magical aura was there, black as night, and gave Ranma the willies even as the mysterious blade just sat on the ground. From what he could gather from his limited senses, the sword's magic aura was attempting to rip apart the very ground it laid on, but was instead beating upon... something. Ranma found his lack of proper perception frustrating, but ultimately satisfying; the power was trying to do what it had been refined to do-destroy, kill, maim, yadda yadda-and something was holding it back. That was good.  
But what bothered him was that the sword had ki. Not active, human ki, or even natural-feeling ki, but the blade had an aura that, if he were to close his eyes and track with his ki senses alone, he could mistake for an actual living creature.  
From what Ranma knew, the idea was ridiculous. He had heard stories of sentient items and swords that could speak and think and tended to do so to the point of annoying their masters, but his limited understanding of the process placed their conscious firmly and totally in the "magical" spectrum. There shouldn't have been any presence within that could emit a ki aura.  
"Hey! Are you gonna stand there all day staring at that thing!"  
Ranma frowned as he glanced toward K. He wanted to snap back at his companion, but the overgrown lizard was right; if past incidences were any indication the demon hunter would be waking up soon, and the man's weapon was really putting him on edge. If he was going to deal with the demon hunter again, he really preferred that it be in the midst of many friendly Ninja.  
That said, he quickly snatched the sword up with his left hand. Bad idea.  
GRR-za-a-ack! "BWAAAUGH!" Ranma screamed as an arc of black lightning lashed out of the sword's handle and surged into his hand and forearm, wrapping coils of deadly energy around his skin and searing it badly.  
"Gyaa!" Luckily, seeing how his arm had become completely paralyzed upon contact with the handle, the intense pain of having dark magics try to rip his arm right open was followed by a powerful, short-range kinetic blast that knocked Ranma backward and away from the cursed blade.  
Thud! "Gwaah! Augh! SON. OF. A. BITCH!"  
"Ranma!" K dashed forward as fast as his little metal legs could carry him, looking quite worried. "Ranma! What happened! Should I get help?"  
Ranma twitched, and then grit his teeth as the minor numbness in his arm faded. Which allowed him to move it (a good thing), but also made it hurt even MORE (a very, very bad thing). "Help... right... no. I don't-GOD! What the hell is that thing! Gasp I... I don't think anyone around here could help out with this." There were plenty of people around, but most of them were just standing in small groups, whispering to each other and looking ready to flee. Stupid people. They got Ninja and demons on a regular basis, and this frightened them?  
Observing his arm, Ranma let out a breath of relief as he sat up. Apparently the pain was worse than the damage, which he supposed could be expected of a small anti-theft enchantment. His arm sported a number of small second-degree burns, and he had one long strip of hardened, smooth, black-and-red matter that had once been healthy biological components of his upper forearm. But his arm worked, and hadn't suffered any damage that looked incurable. He couldn't ask for much more than that. He was glad the sword's presence had put him on edge; he had been unconsciously channeling some ki defensively in a small effort to protect himself should the sword do anything to him once grasped. Sometimes he really wished his conscious mind could keep up.  
"Okay then... moving the sword... this is gonna be trouble..." He couldn't just leave it here. To someone who wasn't sensitive to magical threats, the weapon was just BEGGING to be stolen from off the streets, and the energy backlash from touching it could have permanently injured a normal human, or killed a curious child.  
"Maybe you have to wear gloves to wield it? He's wearing gloves," K pointed out helpfully, though he was chiding himself mentally. No magical protection enchantment would be thwarted so easily by a thin layer of cloth.  
Ranma was thinking the same thing, but was smirking slightly, as he was one step ahead of the metadragon. He still didn't know what the gauntlet on his wrist was supposed to be, but it was more than the demon hunter had been wearing, and had proven unreasonably durable so far.  
Carefully approaching the weapon and crouching down, Ranma reached out with his right hand and extended his index finger, carefully positioning himself so that if he got shocked again and his arm went numb, then it would fall out of contact with the blade's handle.  
He almost flinched when a small spark popped up from the point of contact, but gently proceeded to lay his entire hand on the handle of the sword with no ill effect.  
"Okay..." Grasping the sword's handle fully, he stood up and tried to pick up the irritating weapon. Of course, he had been using the exact amount of strength he thought would be appropriate to lift up a weapon of the sword's size. As such, the blade didn't budge, and Ranma barely caught himself from falling down on top of it from his misplaced leverage.  
"Whoa! Easy!" K shouted, making sure to stay a good ways back.  
"Yeah, okay! Fine!" Ranma braced his legs and pulled much harder, and was rewarded by the magic sword slowly rising up off the ground in his grip. His opinion of Rayden immediately jumped a few notches; this thing weighed at least three times what it appeared to. More than enough to discount it as a useful weapon to most creatures, even disregarding that it seemed to electrocute people it didn't like. He really had no idea how strong the demon hunter had to be to wield the blade as easily as he did.  
He noticed the gem set in the pommel glow briefly, then faded back to normal. Rarely a good sign.  
Moving over to Rayden's body, Ranma angled the sword into the sheath attached to the man's back, and carefully slid it inside.  
"Now what?" K asked, flying up to land on Ranma's shoulder.  
Ranma sighed. "Now I lug this guy down to Ninja central," he said irritably, quite aware that the task he had just spoken of was going to be more problematic then it sounded. Rayden was a deal bigger than he was, was wearing heavy clothes, had who-knows-how-much weight in his pockets dragging him down, and had that damn sword on him too.  
Simply pulling the man's arm up to get him in a position to lift him into a fireman's carry, Ranma knew that it was going to be a loooooong walk back.

"K, the next time we run into this guy and I have to beat him unconscious, remind me to finish him off," Ranma muttered as he stomped up the path to the Shisou compound, Rayden's limp arms draped over one side, and his limp legs hanging off the other. "I mean, seriously. Guy's way too much trouble."  
The metadragon sweatdropped as he waddled behind Ranma, on the ground. Not his favorite method of transportation, but he recognized that he weighed a good twenty or thirty pounds himself, and didn't want to be the straw that broke the Ninja's back. "In all fairness, he just seems to have a bad habit of getting into fights. First in the Amazon village, then those grend hunters, then the dryad, then the **other** dryads, then the Phoenix, and... well, here we are." K frowned. "I mean, we haven't seen him do anything really EVIL yet."  
"He looked about ready to kill Kim," Ranma noted, rounding the last corner before the Shisou main compound.  
K looked at him curiously. "So?"  
Ranma just sweatdropped. He could see the metadragon's point, but... "Look, it's a human thing. Some of us think it's wrong to kill a human unless you have a really good reason. And someone swindling you out of a bar tab isn't a good reason."  
"But... it's KIM," K reasoned. "He's an idiot."  
"Stupidity isn't a good reason to kill someone, either," Ranma said evenly, "though some would argue that it should be."  
The metadragon frowned. "Okay... but don't humans have a long history of warring with each other?"  
"Look, don't argue with me, okay!" Ranma said, obviously agitated. "I'M the expert on humans here! And killing an innocent human is wrong!"  
K nodded, accepting Ranma's explanation despite his unwillingness to indulge his questions. "Okay... so does that mean killing innocent non-humans is okay, then?"  
"Technically, no," the pigtailed man admitted, "although it is a helluva lot easier on the conscience."  
After a short while longer, they had reached the main building of the Shisou, and Ranma finally dumped Rayden on the ground, trying to catch his breath.  
K frowned. He hadn't been distracted with a load, and had thus been observing his surroundings the whole time. "Hey, Ranma? Does it seem... a little cold to you?"  
Ranma blinked, then shrugged. "Yeah, I guess. No big deal though." Unusual weather patterns were hardly on the top of his list of things to deal with right now.  
Then he took a good look at the building he was facing, and noticed that the door and outer walls had frost on them. "Oh."  
"There's no way that's natural ice," K said nervously, stretching out his limited magical senses at the same time Ranma deployed his own ki-based ones.  
After a bare moment, they came up with the same result.  
"Oh, crap."

"Now zen, little girl, vy don't ve stop vasting time. You zink I **like** zlaughtering you veak mortals?" Leia grinned as she beheld the Ninja girl standing shakily before her. "I haf... questions. And I'm no longer hungry. Ve can vork zis out, yes?"  
"I will tell you NOTHING," Natalie swore, her voice almost cracking as she held her kodachi at the ready. All around her laid the corpses of her former trainees and not a few of the Shisou's full-fledged Ninjas as well. Many were impaled on huge blades and spikes of ice, others had been sliced apart cleanly, while others still had been frozen solid in place, looking as if they had been taken by the shell of ice in the middle of some defensive action.  
The most disturbing thing for the young woman, of course, was that several of the corpses were missing limbs, and the human-looking fiend in front of her had partially frozen blood around her mouth and dribbling down her chin.  
Leia shrugged, her grin lessoning to a smirk. "Very vell, I have plenty of time, and I can torture you at my leizure. But first... ze knife haz to go."  
Merely waving her hand, Leia caused several small blue motes of light to appear around the withdrawn blade. Within a split second of forming, each individual spark shot toward the blade of the weapon, causing frost to instantly coat the edge.  
Natalie gasped and quickly dropped the blade, grasping her weapon hand against her chest in an attempt to warm it. In the bare moment it had taken her to drop her weapon, her fingers had turned an almost pure white from the sudden drainage of heat, and she had freeze burns on the sections of skin that were actually grasping the hilt.  
K-shak! The kodachi, dropped as it was still suffering a sudden extreme drop in temperature, shattered instantly upon hitting the ground.  
"Now..." Leia grinned even wider than before, revealing perfectly human-looking teeth that slowly shifted into long, red-stained spikes before the frightened girl's very eyes. "... It eez time ve had a CHAT."  
"I hope you can talk in your sleep, then," a voice said from behind Leia, right before Ranma's roundhouse kick impacted solidly with the side of her head.  
The strike, by all rights, should have caused serious damage to her cranium and knocked her into and through the adjacent wall, all the while causing her to plow through several of her own ice formations.  
Instead, Leia gasped in surprise as her body flew through the air, and then quickly decelerated while still airborne, coming to a dead stop in mid-air right before hitting one of her own ice spikes.  
Ranma sweatdropped. "Tougher than she looks. Of course." The attack had been blunted by some sort of shield that was constantly present around the woman's body, creating a small buffer between the tight bodysuit she wore and any incoming attack, and Ranma could tell by the significant chill in his foot that it had other effects.  
"R-RANMA! We have to get out of here!" Natalie screamed, dashing up to him and grabbing the pigtailed man's arm.  
Leia would have no such thing happen, and she thrust her palm out, holding it in the air as a blue glow encompassed her hand.  
A sharp noise alerted Natalie, K, and Ranma to a thick wall of ice spontaneously forming over the nearest exit.  
Leia grinned, though it was a very angry kind of grin that gave Ranma the impression that she was contemplating pleasure rather than experiencing it. "Zo... you are ze mortal keeper. I zee you haf ze artifact. And my brozer dragon."  
Ranma blinked, and fought the urge to scratch his head (he had to keep both hands free for a defensive action). "Okay, what? What's this all about?"  
Leia flexed her hands as she focused energy on making the bruise on her face heal. She was going to greatly enjoy completing her mission, and didn't want the light throbbing on the side of her head to blemish the experience.  
"Ze demon lord Dashtall Greken zends his greetings, human zcum! You vill die for your theft of my mazter's property!"  
"What property!" Ranma shouted, taking up his defensive stance and grasping his sword. Unarmed attacks might not work, but seeing how the woman's energy shield only blunted the force behind attacks rather than stopping them completely, a sword would work much better toward harming her.  
"Ze glove. And ze metadragon." Leia said simply, before gazing fondly at K. "Do not vorry, brozer. You vill soon know ze bliss that I do under Lord Greken's care."  
K shuddered in revulsion, and glared at her. "Go suck an ice cube, snow dragon. I'm not interested."  
Unbeknownst to K and the bristling Leia, Ranma's pigtail suddenly stuck straight out. Surprisingly, he managed to avoid any other indication of surprise. 'Snow... DRAGON?'  
"You can be forgiven for your ignorance," Leia said, her anger boiling to the surface and mostly sharpening the lazy drawl that usually made up her Japanese, "you are young, and you know nothing yet of our master. You are coming vith me, and your human vill die."  
K just snorted. He had no idea what had happened to this casually cruel, short-tempered snow dragon to ever make her so subservient to a creature not of her own species, but he wanted no part of it. "There's no point in talking about this. Go get 'er, Ranma!" He was actually quite surprised that Ranma hadn't already butted in when she had implied that Ranma had belonged to him.  
"... K?" Ranma asked hesitantly. "When you say 'snow dragon', you mean... you know... snow DRAGON dragon, right? Like you, but bigger?"  
K blinked. "Yeah. She's a dragon. She's just in her human form now."  
Ranma lowered his head and shook it back and forth, an action that confused all others currently in the room. "I get it. Okay, fine. Natalie, get behind me, please."  
The trainee did so hesitantly, more than afraid of what was going to occur soon.  
Ranma shifted into a sideways stance, and let his aura burn tightly around him, easily entering the visible spectrum.  
Leia seemed neither surprised nor impressed by the spectacle, and pulled her arms in as her own aura, augmented by her innate and trained magic abilities, came to bear. The room temperature immediately dropped at least thirty degrees, and four volleyball-sized spheres of mana coalesced into existence around her, forming spell patterns automatically within them.  
Ranma smirked slightly. No way was he going to let her get first strike. "Let's see you deal with this!" Suddenly his aura burst, and Leia's eyes narrowed as she raised another shield in front of her. "SAOTOME ANYTHING-GOES SECRET TECHNIQUE! _FAST BREAK_!"

The sound of cracking ice was the only noise that remained in the office's main lobby, aside from the almost imperceptible hum coming from Leia's spell spheres. For several moments, one could even hear a weak cricket chirp a few times from just outside the formerly-blocked entryway, right before its body succumbed to the numbing cold and it died amongst the frost.  
Leia's mind was in turmoil. Complete turmoil. Realistically, turmoil wasn't nearly descriptive enough. Trying to understand what was running through her mind at that very moment would have yielded about the same kinds of results as violently electrocuting a sleeping man and then asking him what had happened the moment you turned off the electrodes. A sharp, complex tactical mind tried its hardest to analyze Ranma's departure as some sort of ultra-complicated Ninja technique that would end with many blades coming at her, while at the same time her natural draconic arrogance and prejudiced disdain for humans tried to throw caution to the wind and pursue the fool, all while her higher senses were grasping desperately for some trace of the target she had essentially been just a gesture away from destroying a moment ago. The other mental faculties opted to stay out of it, watching with bleak helplessness as the struggling logic centers slowly drowned themselves in anger.  
Hardly the best solution to mental gridlock, but it got the job done.  
"He dies slow..." Her eyes glowed a bright blue, and her aura flared even brighter. Needlessly, she expended the power of her spell spheres.

Ranma observed with no small amount of trepidation that the whole of the Shisou primary compound had become one huge, jagged icicle jutting up from the ground. He didn't expect anything less after his escape, but the reaction didn't make him feel any better.  
"What are you doing!" K asked irritably. Ranma had been so quick to grab him and Natalie that he hadn't had time to put either in any comfortable position for being pulled along with him through a relatively strong ice wall at speeds neither of them could hope to reach alone. In K's case, Ranma had resorted to holding onto his neck, and while the wanderer's grip didn't even begin to irritate K's metallic hide, the drag created by his body trailing along behind his head had done the job easily.  
Natalie looked to be in slightly better shape; Ranma had gotten a better hold around her, though he didn't seem to notice yet that he was gripping one of her breasts. Overall, the girl could hardly complain though, and there were far more important matters to see to.  
"Why're you running away! If you needed me and Miss Ninja to get back, you didn't have to go yanking on us!"  
Natalie flushed, but remained quiet. She was actually more than grateful that she had been hauled out of there, but still felt that this conversation was a tad beyond her.  
"Why am I running away!" Ranma said, looking at K as though the metadragon were truly stupid. "Why do you think! She's a dragon! A REAL FREAKIN' DRAGON!"  
K stared at him. "So? You could've taken her!"  
Slap! Ranma groaned and massaged his head. "Is there something wrong with you! For your information, Mister Monster Library Lizard, dragons bigger than you are just **slightly** out of my league."  
K looked at Ranma as if he had just noticed that he was standing next to a total stranger. Ranma grimaced.  
"K, **look**. Certain monsters and demons rank quite clearly on the wanderers' general 'Do **NOT** Screw With!' list. They **include**, but are **not** limited to: Greater undead, mind flayers, beholders, dragons, gorgons, blood angels, psilors, espers, and **anything** with the word 'God' associated with it! We're not talking beefed-up killing machines, here; we're talking beings of insane magic ability who can kill scores of people while sitting down!"  
The metadragon, for all his complete understanding of what Ranma was saying, was nonetheless flabbergasted. "But... I mean... before, with the psuedo-dragons..."  
"They were psuedo-dragons," Ranma explained calmly. "Psuedo. Not the real thing. Stupid, overgrown reptiles with no unusual abilities beyond tunneling underground really fast and breathing fire. Full-fledged dragons aren't even CLOSE! Hell, you should know that better than anyone!" By now the pigtailed man had set Natalie down, even if he hadn't noticed where he had grabbed her. She kept her peace, though.  
"Well... but..." K struggled to collect his thoughts, even as it dawned on him that this conflict wasn't going to be as simple as him sitting back and watching Ranma show off. "You said you killed a dragon before! It killed your friends! That's why you hate dragons!"  
Ranma snorted. "Yeah, I've killed a dragon before. With a squad of other mercenaries. AND heavy weapons. AND the element of surprise. You just don't mess with these kinds of creatures unless you have backup and you know exactly what you're getting into!" He looked away, arms crossed over his chest. "And for the record, I don't dislike dragons because one ate some of my friends. I've lost people I've known to almost every species of monster and mystic. But that's what I tell people when they ask why I don't like dragons."  
K blinked. "Then what's the real reason?"  
"It's not important right now, that's what it is," the pigtailed man snapped. "Look, most of the trainees and graduates were either out training in the field or out in town, so the people killed in the building represent a pretty small portion of the people that'll eventually be coming here to check things out."  
He turned toward Natalie. The girl was scared, obviously, but behind the fear was a much stronger desire to help, for fear that many more of her friends and companions could die. The female Ninja stood at attention, and swallowed nervously. "Wh-What do you want me to d-do?"  
Ranma couldn't help but smile a little. The massacre he had seen inside the office lobby wasn't the sort of thing most people could have walked away from with much determination and confidence left. "Natalie, I want you to find all the Ninja you can, preferably the higher-ranking ones, and keep them AWAY from here at all costs. None of them can beat this thing. Hell, Master Matsute himself would be just barely enough of a threat to it to warrant actual attention while being wiped out. We're talking serious magic power with serious constitution to shrug off an attack. Got it?"  
"What are you going to do?" The female trainee asked. She was a little more than worried for the Shisou's latest prodigy. Not only was he the target of the assault, but he seemed the type to go and get himself killed to save everyone else if he had to.  
"I'll try and get her attention and lead her away from the city," Ranma said, confirming Natalie's fears.  
"Ranma, there's no way!" K insisted, "If you can't beat her, there's no way you'll last running away from her! Especially not once you leave the city!"  
"I'll worry about that WHEN and IF I get that far. Priority one is luring that freak away before she decides to butcher some more Ninja out of spite." Ranma said firmly. His tone spoke of one who knew what he was doing, but who knew he was brushing it too close.  
Natalie grabbed his arm. "Ranma, don't! Please! We can get everyone away without you acting as a distraction! Don't go out there!"  
"Not gonna happen," the pigtailed man said firmly, looking away. "She's after me. And if typical 'evil dragon' tactics hold true, then she's gonna start a massacre as soon as she decides it'll bring me out quicker than a search. I can't let that happen."  
A few tears slid down Natalie's face, but she remained mostly calm as she sorted through the situation. "I... I'll do as you ask, then."  
To Ranma's surprise, instead of rushing off to follow his instructions, the Ninja girl grabbed him and pulled him down into a deep liplock, grasping the back of his head as she invaded his mouth with her tongue.  
K raised the little ridge of metal that served as an eyebrow for him, and smirked as Ranma twitched helplessly, caught completely off-guard.  
Natalie finally broke the kiss, and held the sides of Ranma's head with her hands as she looked into his eyes imploringly. "Please... don't die. I saw David among the people on the main floor, and... I don't think I can stand losing another friend today." She smiled sadly as a few tears ran down her cheeks, and had Ranma not been busy regaining higher brain functions, he would have felt compelled to hug her reassuringly.  
Nevertheless, Natalie turned away with determination and leapt toward the wall of a single-story building that had been a convenience store at some point in the past, grasping the edge of the structure before flipping herself up on top.  
"Well, this is all quite nice and overdramatic. You have some kind of plan?" K said, idly poking Ranma with his wing.  
"No, not really," Ranma said immediately, surprising K with his recovery from the unexpected burst of affection.  
'I guess he's used to it,' the metadragon thought. "So what're we gonna do?"  
"What are the chances of you being able to talk some sense into her?" Ranma asked, not really holding much hope for that approach. Diplomacy and negotiation weren't his preferred methods of dealing with problems, and in fact seemed to have a much higher rate of failure than usual simply because of his presence.  
"Not bloody likely," K snorted. "Something's wrong with her. I've never seen or heard of a dragon so enraptured by servitude. EVER. She's so into it that she expects me to jump at the chance to join her. Negotiation is out."  
Ranma sighed. "I thought as much. Anything you can tell me about snow dragons in general?"  
"Well, I'm sure you've noticed the affinity for cold magic by now," K drawled, "but actually, snow dragons are considered weaker than ice and storm dragons because they're physically inferior."  
Ranma immediately perked up at that. Physical weakness was good.  
"However, that's just among dragons, who have a very high resistance to magic. To most other creatures, a snow dragon's greater control and mastery of elemental spells and manipulation make them deadlier than the physically stronger species."  
Ranma's hope died a very painful death, and his left eyebrow twitched miserably.  
"One of the more interesting abilities they have is the ability to create a very sudden and severe drop in temperature at a single point within their field of vision, which can freeze enemies almost instantly from the inside, unless they have proper resistances. Not very useful against armies or anything because of the concentration involved, but, well... I guess it's something you should look out for."  
Ranma twitched some more. "This... is very bad..."  
"Uh..." K sweatdropped. "Well, their weakness is severe heat. That's good for you, right?"  
Judging by the man's grimace, he didn't think much of the advantage.  
'Master Rakkyo, you old bastard,' Ranma thought, looking up the Heavens as he prepared himself to move out, 'if there was ever a time I needed your art's strength, this is it! I swear to every deity I've ever heard of, if your stupid techniques don't get me through this alive, I'll come back and haunt you for the rest of my afterlife!'

Far away, in a small cave in Mongolia, a man that looked to be in his early thirties suddenly sneezed, wiped his nose, and then quickly went back to romancing the young woman sitting across from him in his hot tub.

Crack! K-SHOOM!  
The wall of sheer ice that covered the Shisou's main base exploded outward, sending cold shrapnel flying across the street to shatter against the other buildings that made up the local ruins.  
Within moments Leia stomped out of the office tower she had just frozen, absolutely livid with rage. Not only had the human angered her with his impudence and insulted her by employing such a simple trick, but because of her outburst she had expended a great deal more energy than she should have while maintaining her human form. And to top it all off, she couldn't detect the damn human! Her magic senses, which were capable of acting as a form of relatively accurate "life radar" seemed strangely ineffective toward locating the more experienced of the human Ninja, and her more basic, raw mana senses were being thrown completely off kilter for some reason.  
Had she not been so upset at being duped, she would have thought to search for K's life energy instead, which would have been absurdly easy. But at the moment, she had become far more interested in what was disrupting her lower senses, and quickly located the source of the disturbance.  
A large man, looking to be in his early twenties, and appearing to be completely human, slowly got up off the frozen ground before her, grimacing and holding a hand over his stomach. He was clearly wounded, as the area of his coat he was clutching was dark with fresh blood, and had another cut and several burns besides.  
As the man began to stretch to relieve some of the tension in his body, Leia pinpointed the source of the disturbance as being the sword strapped to the man's back. Dark mana gushed from the weapon like water from a broken hydrant, except that the power was being somehow contained within a powerful seal or bubble that prevented any significant release of the energy. That explained why she hadn't even noticed the magical signature until now.  
A second glance at the swordsman, who still hadn't noticed her or his current environment, revealed another fun fact. "You... You're not human!"  
Rayden turned around, and blinked as he beheld a thin, blue-haired woman. "You're not human either!" He countered, pointing at her. He wasn't sure why the accusation was relevant, but it only seemed fair after she had said the same thing to him.  
Leia ignored his comment. "Tell me where ze human went! Ze one vith ze black glove and ze metadragon! Vhere did he go!"  
The demon hunter frowned, recognizing the description immediately. Then he scratched his chin and stared down at the ground in deep concentration.  
"Hmmmmm..." suddenly his head jerked up, and he snapped his fingers. "Ah! That's right!" He turned back toward the disguised dragon. "I was unconscious up until now, so I don't know!"  
SHNG! "Gwah!" Rayden doubled over in agony as Leia promptly rammed a large icicle into the open wound in his stomach, the point bursting out his backside in a spray of blood and gore.  
"Not... again... twice... last hour... oy..." The swordsman fell to the ground twitching, and reflected upon the unfairness of having his earlier impalement wound torn open again. It certainly didn't help that the icicle spike used was much greater in volume than the katana that had stabbed him before. Using the sword wound as an easy entry point, the attack had done all sorts of very bad things to his precious organs.  
Leia walked right past the demon hunter, giving full attention to her magic-enhanced senses. She had contemplated stealing the man's sword, but the power inherent in the blade was making her wary of making contact without preparatory spells and safeguards in case the weapon was cursed. And as those spells took some time and preparations themselves, she decided to put the weapon aside for now and concentrate on her primary objective. Her master would not be pleased if she were to fail her mission and bring him a cursed sword as recompense.

Stalking irritably down the street, the snow dragon continued her magical scan, and continued to fail to pick up any trace of Ranma.  
Stretching her senses out further, she noted several small groups of humans on the outlying area of the ruins, clustered together and moving into the forest. Judging by the movement and size of the group...  
Leia grinned maliciously. Trying to evacuate people, were they? 'The human seems like one of those corny hero types... a little, anyway. Maybe he'll come out if I spill a little more blood. Expelling all that energy HAS made me hungry again...'  
Floating up off the street, she momentarily debated whether or not to switch to her dragon form, but decided against it. It was fairly impossible to hide as a massive, floating, sixty-foot snake, and it might intimidate her target into cutting his losses and running. Well... running some more.  
"Hey, sno-cone breath!"  
Leia blinked as she heard the metadragon's high-pitched voice from atop one of the buildings to her side, and she turned.  
"Huh. Zo you abandoned ze human? Smart creature," she deadpanned. If the dragon was giving himself to try and save his human, or some nonsense like that, then he was in for a severe disappointment. She was told quite clearly that the mortal's death and the recovery of the gauntlet was top priority; recovering the stolen dragon was just an extra bonus that would be sure to bring her favor among Dashtall's servants.  
K snorted. "Hardly. Listen up, you sycophant: I don't know what this 'Greken' dweeb means to you, but I'm not being carted off to be some demon lord's slave, you got that!"  
The snow dragon smirked. "Oh, come now. Eez it zlavery if you chooze to zerve him?"  
"I'm choosing NOT to, you dip!" K said angrily. "Now go away! You're not wanted here!"  
Leia simply shook her head sadly and stuck a palm out at K, manipulating the flows of moisture in the air and preparing a spell pattern to flash-freeze them into a shell around her bounty.  
She never got the opportunity, as her honed senses suddenly detected a powerful heat source dashing toward her back, seemingly having appeared out of thin air. Reflexively she attempted to dodge to the side, too surprised to attempt a shield or proper defense.  
Kshk! Thwoom! streams of flame curled around the dragon as the ki-enhanced katana pierced her body, barely missing the heart due to her last-second movement.  
Ranma drove his sword down to its hilt as the snow dragon screamed in shock and agony, allowing his _blazing claw_ technique to expend the last of his built-up ki.  
He clicked his tongue as he realized that he had missed the key vitals. Not that he was expecting it to be that easy. "You know, you really should do something about guarding your back. As you are now, you might as well just stick a sign there that says 'attack here'."  
Still speaking calmly, as if wasn't jabbing his weapon into a creature who overpowered him by leaps and bounds, he gripped the katana firmly and then twisted it while Leia was still impaled, eliciting a gargled scream from the wounded snow dragon.  
Rearing back a hand to strike, Ranma hesitated on the attack once he saw that his katana had suddenly collected a thick frost over its edge that was quickly solidifying into a thick coating of solid ice. He didn't feel anything, because his left hand wasn't touching the weapon, and his right one was protected by the mysterious gauntlet. Nevertheless, Ranma quickly released his grip on the handle and leapt away...  
Or tried to. As it turned out, while the gauntlet still seemed to be indestructible, apparently there was nothing keeping the moisture on the glove from freezing and sticking to the sword handle.  
"Well, crap." Thwack! Leia's backhand easily broke the bond between sword and glove through the sheer power behind it, and Ranma flew across the street and into an adjacent building, smashing into it with enough force to leave a deep impact crater in the concrete wall.  
Leia looked distastefully at the sword poking through her chest, and, seeing how the blade hadn't contracted deeply enough to break apart on its own from the cold, quickly decided on a method to deal with the wound. Not her favorite way to handle damage control, but the sword was obviously magical, and it was already frozen to her body anyway. No sense in taking pointless risks.  
K, who was observing from above, blinked as ice spread slightly further around the impalement wound in Leia's chest, leaving a thick coat of ice atop the plain black bodysuit she wore. On one side of the wound, the ice continued spreading, moving to the right side of her torso and merging under her arm.  
K's eyes bugged out of his head as the snow dragon suddenly ripped the mass of ice right out of her body, sword and all, leaving a gaping hole in her torso covered in frozen shards of blood and bone.  
A thin, vein-covered layer of skin immediately covered the jagged, icy exposed area, and quickly began to expand and thicken as the internals unfroze and began to regenerate themselves.  
"Now that's just **unfair**," Ranma mumbled, idly dusting dirt and debris off his side. 'I really AM the only person who can't get right back up after being impaled!'  
"Life izn't fair," Leia snarled, "but you von't haf zat problem for much longer!" She stuck her palm out toward the wanderer, and her eyes narrowed as she concentrated.  
Ranma grimaced as small motes of lights appeared around his legs, darting into his body and disappearing in small flashes of light as they drained the heat from his body. "Not... good!"  
K took action, jumping off of his perch and dive-bombing Leia at terminal speed. With all his meager power, he knew all he could do was distract her (since she didn't have any metal on her for him to steal and eat), but that was all that was required to break the attack upon Ranma.  
Thwap! K failed spectacularly in his self-assigned mission, slamming beak-first into an invisible barrier of ice that Leia had thought to set up after being assaulted from behind twice in a row. He painfully slid down the face of it, and eventually landed on the ground, mostly unnoticed.  
Lei grinned as her foe fell down to his knees, her attacking already having moved past his legs and up toward his waist. She ignored the fact that her ability was responding slightly differently than usual - the lights were bursting instead of simply disappearing into the body - as using it on a living being rather than an inanimate object always yielded less predictable results.  
Ranma grit his teeth as his body continued being assaulted by crippling cold, his body heat being swiftly sucked right out of his body. 'Just a little more...'  
"It'z really a shame I don't haf a more **painful** vay to execute you at my disposal. Ice magic eez ZO limited in itz ability to inflict zuffering." The snow dragon grinned cruelly as she finished draining around Ranma's chest, and thus his heart and lungs.  
'That's it...' Ranma thought, his consciousness shaky as he felt the massive strain on his ki reserves. 'Just keep yapping...'  
Leia had FINALLY noticed, at this point, that while Ranma's body had been drained up to his neck, his body wasn't showing many of the signs of having the heat sucked out of your flesh almost to the point of absolute zero. The wanderer was on his knees, for one thing, rather than lying insensate on the ground. His body was covered in thick frost from the freezing moisture, but hadn't cracked itself and broken apart, which was usually the effect from having the body's liquids freeze and expand while the rest of the tissue contracted normally. And most odd of all... he just exhaled. 'Didn't I just freeze his lungs? Odd... oh well. I'll just spend some extra time on his head.'  
Her curiosity turned to surprise when Ranma slowly stood up, shivering as frost and liquefied gases clung to his body. "Wh-What? What's going on here!" Leia growled as she forced more power into draining Ranma's body of heat. How was this possible? Creatures that had a suitable resistance to magic to survive her attack didn't just **survive** her attack; in such a case the ability failed, leaving the target unscathed. In this case, her attack had succeeded, but the target had inexplicably survived. But that was only possible in creatures like fire elementals, or salamanders, because they their bodies generated enough heat to... Leia's eyes widened.  
Ranma coughed up the last of the air in his lungs to clear his mouth, and then sucked in a breath of cold, but gaseous, air. "Ch-Chemistry 101 f-freak..." his face twisted into a pained smirk. "Liquid o-oxygen... plus f-fire... equals..." Without another word, Ranma thrust his hands forward and released control of his aura, channeling his ki flames forward through the liquid gases covering him and into the heat vacuum left behind by Leia's draining technique.  
BWOOM! The snow dragon panicked and put more power into her shields as flame exploded around Ranma, immediately snaking around his body and seeping into a red-hot ki beam that blasted straight toward her.  
Leia screamed as the firebolt pounded against her shield, which had been sloppily erected and hastily reinforced. Almost immediately, huge cracks branched out from the impact point of the beam, and a loud shattering noise was drowned out by the roaring flames as they broke past the shattered pieces of the dragon's defenses, engulfing Leia in a storm of fire.

Ranma finally stopped channeling his energy into the ki bolt, not because he was anywhere close to out of energy, but because it was getting too damned HOT!  
The moment he stopped engulfing his body in superheated ki, his eyes widened and he fell down to his knees, biting his tongue to keep from crying out.  
His fire aura had been tightly contained within his body such that he could have survived Leia's heat-draining attack. This had succeeded in keeping his body interior warm enough that it didn't suffer any real damage. Likewise, the same aura protected him when he had ignited his ki to its full power, preventing significant damage even while the fireball that had consumed him reached and passed the kinds of temperatures he could safely generate.  
And while his abilities had done an EXCELLENT job of preventing any actual damage to his body, and actually had even protected his clothes from being burnt right off, having your skin subjected to life-threatening cold followed by life-ending heat hurt like you wouldn't believe.  
"Never - Gasp- gonna do that - Gasp- again!" Looking down at himself, Ranma noticed that somehow, flash-frying his skin had resulted in an usually fine tan, rather than his body turning red as cherry from burns. Odd.  
"I'll bet I just tripled my chances for skin cancer," Ranma mumbled irritably, getting up as he managed to push the stinging agony to the back of his mind. Then he noticed the flames surrounding Leia's position as they quickly began to die, yielding to a powerful blue aura that swallowed up the heat. "Of course, death from some possibly curable condition twenty or thirty years down the road isn't looking that bad right now..."  
Leia got up slowly, the flames ebbing away as the air around her chilled.  
Her bodysuit had been completely burned away, though her heavily burned and severely damaged body only provided a distraction at this point if one were of a weak stomach. The wounds were regenerating though, if not at a much slower rate than before.  
The snow dragon didn't speak. She offered no taunts, warnings, or angry promises of retribution. She raised her arms up, and allowed twin streams of death to pour from her hands in the form of two thick beams of pure cold.  
Ranma wasn't about to be caught flat-footed by such a brutal frontal assault, and leapt away toward the adjacent building as huge blossoms of icicle spikes exploded out of the ground below him, where the beams impacted.  
'Well, I got her nice and mad. She's hurting though, I can tell. Even with the regeneration.' He grimaced as Leia fanned her hand to the side, and he began running horizontally across the wall of the building he had jumped toward as projectile icicles homed in on him, each one missing by only a few feet and smashing into the concrete.  
Leia hastily erected another barrier, and then a blue circle drew itself around her in the air, slowly rotating in a position parallel to the ground.  
"Lonely hearts buried beneaz cold earz, rize up und pierce ze living vith your mizery! _Suin splinter_!"  
Ranma finally jumped off of the building he had been running on, having determined the locale relatively unsafe as huge tendrils composed of writhing, fluid ice burst from the ground and stabbed into the structure, wrapping around it and growing upward like monster vines. Sailing across the street, he touched the side of the building opposite his previous perch and latched onto a windowsill, trying to determine the best vector for attack that wouldn't end with his intestines wrapped around a stalagmite.  
'I've done some serious damage to her because I was able to surprise her before... but now what! I can't even get my sword back without an extra thirty pounds of frozen meat attached to it!' Ranma was running out of tricks, and he knew it. He had managed to utilize Leia's arrogance with better results than he had hoped for, but now the draconian witch had finally buckled down and decided to take him seriously.  
He grimaced as he saw her summon several light-blue spheres that floated around her head.  
"Furies of old, hear my plea..." Leia chanted. Let the vile human run. The more he delayed the inevitable, the more time she'd have to heal her wounds. And when she could concentrate her full energies to the attack again... "drain the life of mortal, take the soul of-"  
BWEEOOO!  
Ranma's eyes bugged out as a thick black beam of energy appeared out of nowhere and smashed into Leia's back, sweeping her along and continuing, uninterrupted, until it met with the very building Ranma was hanging on to.  
KA-KROOM! The beam detonated, with Leia at the head of it, at the base of the former hotel, and Ranma winced as a sphere of dark lightning expanded outward violently from the detonation point, tearing through cement and rending steel in its wake.  
The sphere stopped expanding roughly twenty feet from the point of impact, and Ranma jumped from his perch as he felt the building tremble uncertainly from the sudden stress to its substructure.

Landing a good distance away from the crater (and the either dead or extremely pissed off snow dragon), Ranma made a dash for his katana as he located the source of the energy blast.  
"What? You're awake already?" The pigtailed man said, grasping the handle of his blade and shaking it to determine how well the chunk of Leia's torso was attached.  
Rayden stood in an alleyway, leaning on a wall and breathing heavily as he held his left palm out, his entire hand smoking and crackling with excess energy released from the attack. "What the hell'd you do to get hunted down by a DRAGON, kid?"  
"Apparently I stole some stuff. I dunno." Whok! Whok! Whok! He beat at the frozen mass for a moment, and then held the katana against the ground with his foot as he pulled at the handle. "People are always out to kill me for one reason or another." He frowned as he looked Rayden over. Apparently the fool had hurt himself since their fight; the hole in his stomach was much more apparent, and everything below it was stained with longs streaks of blood and dirt. The lower part of his coat must have been completely soaked a deep red.  
"Well, I wish you'd leave ME out of it!" K shouted, alerting the two demon hunters to his whereabouts among the scorched crater from Ranma's attack. "Bad enough I get blasted with fire, but that stupid dark beam almost took my friggin' head off!"  
Rayden would have argued that he should've expected as much being in a battle zone, and Ranma would have argued that K was only subjected to attempted assassinations because he had insisted on coming with him, but both fighters were alerted to the active aura being emitted from the impact point of Rayden's energy blast.  
Leia stalked out of the impact crater, smoke wafting from her body, and aura burning so brightly it actually flickered red among the mighty haze of bright blue.  
That last attack had hurt. Significantly. That energy beam had been pure grade "A" dark magic, the kind that excelled wonderfully at inflicting that special kind of nasty pain, suffering, and ultimate demise, and had she not had such a high resistance to magic, she would have been toast, pure and simple. The minor ice shield had helped cushion the blow... but only barely.  
The human, though... THAT one had to die. And she would've insisted his death be horrendously slow and intensely painful, in front of his family and loved ones (or perhaps kill them first, in front of him?), had she the luxury of taking him alive. Not only did her normal magic resistance offer no protection against the strange, apparently non-magical flames that came from his body, and that last attack had hurt like HELL, by the way, but he continued to elude her attacks and trick her into lowering her guard. And now, he had made her so incoherent with rage that she had considerable difficulty forming a simple strategy to deal with him. Oh, yes. There would be much pain, hurting, and gnashing of teeth before night fell.  
"Die..." she mumbled, forming a sphere of blue mana in her hand.  
"Die!" She shouted, releasing the sphere into the air.  
"**DIIIIIIIIIIE**!" She screamed, shoving both her palms forward. A huge ice beam, similar to the other ones she had fired but with roughly twice the radius, burst forth from the spell sphere, plowing through the air with an audible rumble and streaking right for the two adventurers.  
Ranma was about to dodge, when he noticed Rayden smirk and jump forward, slashing his sword into the beam.  
"GO BACK TO YOUR NEST, SERPENT WITCH!" The dark paladin shouted, allowing the huge ice beam to strike his sword's edge head-on. SHWOOOM!  
To Ranma's shock, the ice beam immediately split off wildly when it touched the sword, and the energy that passed over it and around Rayden's body quickly dissipated into nothing, first losing its kinetic energy, then any sign of its elemental properties, and finally fading away as if it had never been. After a few moments, the entire spell had expended itself, and when the light had cleared, Rayden stood at attention, smirking, with no sign that the huge beam had ever been expelled.  
Rayden laughed. "Not so tough now, are ya? Think you're something, walking up to me and cramming a big ol' icicle through my-"  
"_Shard blozzom_!" Leia shouted, snapping her fingers in annoyance. A blue magic circle immediately formed and began spinning slowly under Rayden, who blinked in surprise.  
K-shang! Ranma winced as a large cluster of razor-sharp ice spikes burst from the ground, severely tearing up Rayden's already-bloody lower body and tossing him away.  
"Well, so much for double-teaming her," Ranma said miserably as he wiped some of the blood spray off his arm.  
Klang! K-Klang! Rayden's greatsword clattered noisily on the sidewalk, being flung away from the much-abused dread knight.  
"DEAD! YOU'RE BOZ **DEAD**!" Leia screamed semi-coherently, summoning yet ANOTHER ice shield around her body, and also forming two large ice blades, one in each hand.  
Ranma's eyes widened as she charged. 'She's closing to melee? HER! NOW! She must have hit her head when that beam struck her!'  
Kling! Ranma deflected her initial slash with his gauntlet, and cut toward her unprotected shoulder as soon as he got a clear opening. Shween! His katana's blade slice harmlessly against the shell of ice around his opponent, and he dodged as Leia's other blade came down in a vertical strike.  
'She's got to be literally crazy with rage to do this up close,' Ranma thought, stabbing quickly in a series of lighting stabs that left tangible cracks in her shield. Then he ducked under another slash. 'She couldn't hope to beat me. She doesn't even look like she's used to this kind of fighting! She's a freakin' spellcaster!' Ranma was able to strike three more times before the snow dragon stabbed for his head.  
Leia growled as Ranma's form seemed to split into two , parting before her attack, and shouted in surprise as both images rushed past, each one slashing at her ice shield.  
By the time she had turned around, Ranma's mirror image had disappeared, and his aura was burning again.  
"_Blazing claw_! HIYAH!" Slashing twice with his sword, he dug two deep gouges in the shield surface before ducking under a counter-slash. Then he twisted while crouching on the ground, and thrust his leg upward in a kick right for Leia's midsection.  
Thrack! Rather than digging into her midsection, his boot embedded itself half an inch into her ice shield, the ki flames trailing around his body digging into the frozen wall and causing cracks to appear throughout the afflicted face of the shield.  
"Hmmm... not good," Ranma concluded, noting that while his ki-enhanced kick had initially melted some of the ice it came in contact with, the moisture had frozen again a split-second later, probably due to contact with the damn shield. And besides making his foot cold, it also made his foot stuck. "Dejavu. DEFINITELY not good."  
Leia growled and swung the blade in her left hand forward.  
Ranma quickly switched his katana out of his right hand for his left, and then grabbed the edge of the left ice sword as it came down. Thankfully, his gauntlet acted as expected and protected his hand from the blade, leaving only the force behind the blow for him to deal with  
Snarling, the snow dragon tried to chop into him with the ice blade in her right hand, only to have it deftly blocked by Ranma's own sword.  
Ranma sweatdropped. He was standing shakily on one leg, with the other leg implanted in Leia's shield, one hand holding her left sword, and the other hand blocking her right sword. "Uhm, hello? K? Dark, semi-evil sword guy? Think you could give me a hand, here?" 'Before this psycho remembers she can kill me with a properly worded sentence!' he added mentally.  
"What am I supposed to do!" K shouted, having retreated to a safe distance from all the violence, "I tried distracting her already, it don't work!"  
"You're friends cannot help you!" Leia hissed, feeding energy into her shield with a mental command. "DIE!"  
CRACK-Boom! A sharp noise, like the breaking of a window, was followed by an explosion, and Ranma grunted as he was struck by a cold wave of kinetic force. At the same time, Leia's shield burst outward from the shockwave, firing ice shards in all directions with great force.  
Ranma grit his teeth as his body was pummeled by the shrapnel, but took the hits easily, even as he landed on the ground and rolled. His danger sense flaring, he rolled much faster as small blue circles began to light up under him, and flipped away as bundles of icicle spikes exploded from the ground under him.  
'Damn, she's serious this time! No monologues or nothing! Gotta think of a plan...'  
He jumped high over a relatively slow-moving ball of blue light, and was only slightly surprised when it burst into a shotgun-style spray of icicles that devastated the already-devastated gas station behind him.  
Glancing back at his opponent, he groaned as he saw her chanting again, though he blinked when he saw another barrier, this one visible, spring to life around her.  
'ANOTHER shield? Yeesh! At this rate, I'll never get through to her!' Then he landed on the ground, and noticed that the demon hunter from before was crawling toward his sword, which was lying on the sidewalk nearby. 'Huh. Maybe I can surprise her again. Worth a shot.'  
Without bothering to ask permission, and ignoring Rayden's startled cry, Ranma swooped in and snatched the magic sword up off the ground with his gloved hand.  
"HEY! COLD-BLOODED FREAK!" Ranma yelled, eliciting a glare from Leia, who was trying to concentrate. 'I wonder if she really is cold-blooded... ask later! Kill now!' "LET'S SEE YOUR FANCY MAGIC SHIELD BLOCK **THIS**!" Ranma held the great sword back, and then flung it toward Leia, trying not to smirk as the snow dragon's eyes widened.  
Leia, for her part, quickly regained her senses after the surprise of seeing a powerful, heavy magical weapon THROWN at her when it obviously wasn't meant for such use.  
After a quick decision, in which she recalled the effect of the blade upon her ice beam, she lowered the shield, stepped forward, and haughtily snatched the weapon out of the air by it's handle, even though it was twirling wildly in the air.  
"Sucker," Ranma said, grinning.  
GRR-ZA-ZA-ZACK! "EGWAAAAAAUGH!" Leia screamed and flailed about wildly as dark lightning tore into her arm, managing to stun her despite her innate resistance to magic.  
Ranma licked his lips and withdrew his nighthawk, not wanting to get close enough to the maelstrom of nasty magical energies for melee combat. "Time to END this!" Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam!  
Leia lurched sporadically as .50 caliber slugs ripped into her chest (her head was jerking around too much to be a worthwhile target), which shook her enough so that the shock-inducing great sword finally fell free of her paralyzed fingers.  
Blam! Blam! Ranma fired his last bullet and let the spent clip fall out onto the ground, breathing heavily as he watched Leia's body convulse.  
And then, the snow dragon's much-abused body started to glow white.

Her heart had been struck. Pierced by a lead bullet and torn asunder within her body. That was it. It was ON.  
Really, Leia had no alternative at this point; once her human form had suffered lethal damage, her only recourse was to transform into her normal body, or go into a healing stasis. The second of those options was not only unattractive, but also severely endangered her mission objective. So it was out.

Outside her consciousness, Leia's body glowed to the point that it seemed her entire body was composed of pure light, restricted by the outline of her human body. And then that outline shifted, and the mass began to grow.

She relished in the feeling of power that overcame the transformation from human to dragon, the energies that had been available to her before finally being loosed at their full potential, like a faucet that had gone from half-closed to full blast.  
Her form continued growing, and she experienced a small wrenching pain as the wound in her heart was spontaneously corrected, disrupting the energies involved in the shift. A necessary nuisance; the rest of her battle damage would be more or less reflected in her dragon form, but she could hardly transform back into a dragon while leaving her heart damaged as it was.

Leia's form stopped growing once it had reached a length of approximately sixty feet, and several large fins, like those of any common fish, began to form from panes of pure light as the dragon's snake-like main body started to fade into a state of stable flesh.

She let ecstasy overtake her as organs she had been missing and limbs that had changed began to settle into their comfortable places, allowing her mind to finally take full control of the power her true body commanded.  
It did occur to her, however, that she had waited a fairly long time to transform into her dragon body, when doing so would have rendered most of the human's tricks and assaults utterly useless. Really, she couldn't even remember why she didn't do it in the first place anymore.  
It might have been something complicated, like the possibility of more points of attack in the urban terrain. Or maybe she had just been wary of scaring him off, and making her presence more difficult to hide as she hunted. Not that she had done a flawless job of that otherwise.  
Once her body continued its transformation, forming a huge, sixty-foot snake-like creature with smooth white skin rather than scales and beautiful fins that shone brightly in gorgeous rainbows as the sunlight streamed through them, she remembered why. Her transformation into a dragon took a good forty seconds, in which her enemy could usually get a good head-start on escaping, set up a quick trap, prepare a powerful spell, or simply stand at the ready and get ready to strike for her most vulnerable spots immediately. Considering how clever this human had proven to be in his battle tactics...  
Leia suddenly became aware of a powerful heat source that was dropping toward her.  
She opened her eyes to see a giant dragon's maw composed of angry flame rocket down toward her unprotected head, Ranma's form barely visible behind the fierce attack.  
Unprotected head. That was the other thing about transforming. When the body shifted, it also purged all defensive spells from shifter. No shields. No protections. No defensive spells. No time to dodge, or bring a less sensitive component of her body around to block. Nothing to keep the hungry ki flames from devouring her, except for skin and bone. Tough skin and bone, granted, but...  
... But as it turned out, Ranma's attack would be the last thing she saw for quite a while.

"_PERFECT DRAGON FIST_!" Ranma yelled, putting every last bit of energy he could possibly channel into the single strike, ki reserves be damned. Adding to the equation the physical force of Ranma driving the punch down, along with gravity, and, well...  
It was going to take more than Advil to fix this.  
KA-KROOOM! The ground shook as Leia's head was smashed into the concrete ground, and the upper portion of the dragon's body and Ranma alike momentarily disappeared in a massive fireball that almost rivaled the one Ranma had generated earlier.

K gaped as he watched the destruction, and swallowed nervously. "Man... if that did it, that was awesome, but if... if it didn't..." Now that Ranma had revealed that he WASN'T some invincible human of mysteriously God-like power, K had no more illusions about him surviving an attack from a snow dragon in its true form. The huge spells that could kill scores of weaker creatures, that normally took a chanting period, could be called up in half the time, and used in conjunction with other abilities simultaneously. If Ranma hadn't managed to kill her...

Lei screeched horribly, and Ranma covered his ears as he jumped back, panting badly and resisting the urge to scratch the new burns on his left arm.  
The snow dragon writhed in agony, tossing her flaming head about with such senseless ferocity that she ended up slamming her head right into a nearby office building.  
Rather than pull away, however, she began to rub her head into the rubble, trying to put out the fire and stop the searing agony that had been branded into her skull.  
"YOU... YOU... W-WRETCH!" Leia hissed, her long, snake-like body twisting about as if in spasm. "I CAN'T... OH, LORD GREKEN HELP ME, I CAN'T SEE!"  
She then let out another high-pitched screech, which once again caused Ranma to wince. If he didn't know any better, he would've sworn that the dragon was... was she CRYING?  
'Huh. If she weren't such a monster, I might feel sorry for her.' As it was, though, Ranma could only feel proud about the suffering he had inflicted upon such a powerful creature, to have it twisting and writhing around like a pinched worm.

"Or, I guess that works too," K said, sweatdropping. He couldn't imagine the kind of pain that Leia was experiencing right now, though as it stood, he was only slightly more sympathetic than Ranma.  
A shuffling noise attracted his attention, and the metadragon jerked back as watched Rayden shamble past, leaving a trail of splattered blood behind him.

"S-Sword. Give it." Rayden demanded, struggling to stand up as he approached the wildly thrashing serpent king (or queen, perhaps).  
Ranma snorted, crossing his arms over his chest. "Oh, so now that she's almost dead, you want to come in and finish her off, huh?"  
"So what!" the dark paladin yelled, flushing a bit.  
Smirking, the pigtailed man started toward the sword. "All right, you can-"  
CRASH! Ranma jerked to a stop as he was peppered with small debris fragments from behind, and he whirled around just as Leia's long tail whipped into him, knocking the wanderer away into the street.  
"I'LL KILL YOU!" The snow dragon swore, her bleeding, soot-covered head still trembling from the pain she felt. Despite the agony of doing so, she opened her jaw and squeezed the chemical sacs in her mouth, expelling a long, thick stream of deadly frost.  
Nobody paid much attention to it, as the blast harmlessly spread over a convenience store, well away from where any of Leia's opponents were.  
"Ow! What does it take to slow that freak down!" Ranma got up off the ground irritably, feeling slightly sore but mostly drained.  
Rayden growled and held out his hand. "The sword! Give me the sword! I don't know how you can hold it, but... just give it to me!"  
Ranma frowned, but nodded and got up, only slightly intimidated by the series of icicle spikes that seemed to be emerging from the ground at random now. 'I guess its hard to cast a spell right when you're in that much pain and you can't see...'  
Dashing forward as the snow dragon's tail whipped about aimlessly, Ranma grasped the handle and then flung the blade over to Rayden, only slightly worried as to whether the demon hunter would be able to catch it.  
Rayden snatched the blade easily out of the air, more as if the sword's handle had been attracted to his palm rather than him having simply possessed that kind of dexterity.  
As soon as he had the sword gripped in his hands, Rayden cracked a smile, feeling some of the pain and weakness in his horribly shredded legs fade away.  
Ranma sweatdropped as he watched a shadowy aura engulf the demon hunter, occasionally complemented by an arc of black lightning coming from the sword. Of course, rather than electrocuting him, it seemed to simply bend energy around him, as if... preparing for something.  
"Hmph." Rayden swung his sword back, and dark energies started to collect along the blade. "Much better... I missed this."  
Rayden stepped carefully over toward the struggling snow dragon, who had finally gained the sense to try and fly away. To that end, her blackened head suddenly arched up into the air, darting for the sky with her body trailing gracefully behind her.  
Naturally, Rayden would have NONE of that. "You're not going anywhere! _Venom strike_!" he shouted, jumping up into the air, black fire exploding around his sword's edge.

Ranma raised an eyebrow as he watched the lower one-third of Leia's body get sliced right off, falling lifelessly to the ground amid a spray of blood. He whistled. "Niiiice."  
Leia herself, having lost both her eyes and her head still throbbing from the intense heat it was exposed to, was in no position to notice the loss of her lower body as anything more than a minor stinging sensation followed by a sudden drop in her total mass. At that point, understandably, she just didn't CARE. She wanted to get away. Away from this human who had tricked her again and again and managed to inflict severe, almost **mortal** damage to her. Then, after some much-needed rest, she would return to rip his spine out of his back and hang him with it.  
She wasn't, however, so out of it that she didn't recognize when she was in even MORE trouble. Losing the lower part of her body wasn't really a big deal for her at this point, but she couldn't help but notice that wound **felt** different than it should have. And what did that demon call the attack he used? Venom strike? Well, no poison could hurt a dragon, unless it was specially prepared for that purpose, and even then it was iffy, but really, the attack felt more like...  
'Oh no...' Leia whimpered as she crashed onto the ground just a kilometer away from where she had escaped the demon hunters. She could feel it. The energy was devouring her body, and for some reason her regeneration wasn't working. If she couldn't stop it...  
'How could this happen to me?' The snow dragon thought, looking up to the sky imploringly. 'How? WHY? To be humiliated like this, to fail my Lord Greken so thoroughly...'  
While most of her mind was busy drowning in self-pity, the rest went toward analyzing her wound. It was odd; most of the time that dark magics like this infected a creature, it was instantly noticeable because the energies tried to consume the soul or damage the link between body and spirit. This energy, however, was simply annihilating her body, careless of what happened to her soul. A most fortuitous circumstance, for that left a way to survive.  
Leia's body began to glow softly as she mumbled the spell in draconic.  
"Light beyond fire, wind, and lightning. Power beyond the reach of darkness. Take this soul from the sea of time, and let the spirit heal the body, free from the ravages of this realm. Where time does not flow, let time heal all wounds! _Stasis cocoon_!"  
A bright flash of light engulfed what was left of her body, and a thick, white beam blasted upward toward the sky as the complex weavings of the spell pattern took effect.

The huge beam of light was rather easy to track among the scattered urban ruins, and it wasn't long before Ranma had found the wounded dragon, climbing mounds of rubble and scattered debris to make the best time he could.  
"Hey! Hurry it up, wouldja?" He yelled back, eliciting a grumble from Rayden, who was only managing faster than a walk with the use of his sword as a walking stick (apparently that jumping slash had drained whatever minor boost he got to be able to use his torn-up legs normally; it had taken several minutes just for him to stand up again), and getting silence from K, who would have had no trouble keeping up, but preferred to hang back in case their quarry decided she was feeling good enough to take the offensive again.  
Ranma turned back around and began to hop down the pile of debris he had climbed, doubtlessly left over from some building devastated on the ground floor by a powerful attack spell, deftly hopping from one jagged piece of rubble to the next. All around him, caught out the corner of his eyes, small creatures that made their home in small crevices and dark enclosures, both those natural to Earth and those not, scampered back to their homes, abandoning their own surveillance of Ranma's target.  
The pigtailed wanderer blinked as he finally jumped onto the ground, which was scarred primarily by Leia's uncontrolled collision with the street. This... was not what he expected.  
Leia's body, that is, her **human** body, lay still within the multi-faceted crystal that laid on the ground, like a perfectly sculpted oval gem with a hideously marred fire victim inside.  
Leia's pelvic region looked as if it had been sheared right off across her body, leaving only the torso and its attached parts remaining. Those didn't look like they were in good shape either, sporting long, scar-ridden burns and other gaping, cauterized wounds. Her head was the worst, looking like some sort of mummy; black, shriveled, and lacking eyes.  
"Well, she 'aint pretty no more," Ranma commented off-handedly, waiting for K to arrive so that he could tell him what the hell was going on here.  
"Ugh. No kidding," K mumbled, flying up to land on his shoulder. "And despite that, she's STILL not dead."  
"Mind telling me what this thing is?" Ranma kicked the crystal with his foot, once again ignoring the little voice in his head that told him he shouldn't mess with such things so casually. Thankfully, nothing happened, other than his foot being slightly sore. That thing was HARD!  
"It's a stasis field," K said, frowning. "It's probably part of a healing spell. That crystal will protect her and halt the harmful elements, while energies inside the crystal will work to remove the elements and repair the damage. I'm guessing she's in human form because it's a much easier body to fully regenerate than her dragon form; the magic should work at the same rate in either to restore mass. So once her human body is fixed, she wakes up, and the healing will transfer over to her true form whenever she next transforms."  
Ranma nodded, mostly understanding K's complex and slightly uncertain explanation. "Great. So she's going to wake up eventually feeling like new. Can't let that happen."  
He turned around, and noted that Rayden was still slowly sliding down the debris mound behind them. And still trailing blood, too. He'd have to help him with that later.  
"Hey! Mister Dread Knight! C'mere!"  
Rayden stopped and pointed to himself for a moment in confusion. Then he reasoned that there weren't any more Third Brotherhood paladins around, and doubled his efforts to get down to the street.  
"That technique you used to cut the dragon's tail off, that was the same one you used to kill that Phoenix king guy, right?" Ranma asked as Rayden finished sliding down.  
The dark paladin blinked and scratched his head with his free hand. "Phoenix... king... Oh! Him! Yeah, it was the same one!"  
Ranma nodded. "Okay. That kept him from regenerating and being resurrected and whatever, right?" He pointed toward Leia's healing cocoon. "Will it stop this spell from healing her?"  
Rayden glanced at the crystal lying on the ground, and then shook his head. "Nah." He turned back toward Ranma. "The _venom strike_ corrupts and destroys whatever I hit with it, and stops any normal healing and regeneration. But dedicated healing spells can stop it, and eventually fix the damage done." He shrugged. "Powerful ones, anyway. And it's only if they survive that long. But a dragon? Yeah, she'll live." Then he hefted his sword and let if rest back against his shoulder, once again returning the burden of his weight to his legs. "That is, unless you want me to finish her off."  
Ranma raised an eyebrow. "Can you do that? This crystal looks pretty solid to me."  
"Not a problem," the demon hunter insisted, "one more _venom strike_ will cut through that like it wasn't even there." Surprisingly, to K at least, Rayden made no move to use the attack, and Ranma rubbed his chin in consideration of the idea.  
"Well? What're you waiting for? Finish her off!" K said.  
Rayden shrugged and started to heft his sword, when Ranma suddenly raised his hand.  
"No, wait. I'm still deciding."  
"What's there to decide on!" K said incredulously, practically shouting in Ranma's ear. "She showed up, slaughtered innocent people, and tried to kill you!"  
"Well sure. That's on the one hand," Ranma explained. "But I sort of have this ethical thing about killing things that can't defend themselves."  
"Me too, really," Rayden said off-handedly.  
K whirled around to face the demon hunter. "YOU! You're a frickin' Dread Knight! You're supposed to be destruction incarnate! Since when did the Brotherhoods have such high moral standards!"  
"Well..." Rayden scratched the back of his head with his free hand. "It's more a personal thing, really. I mean, killing someone after they retreated and while they're asleep trying to heal up... it just isn't any **fun**, you know?"  
Thud! K commenced a spectacular facefault dive from Ranma's shoulder, landing in a twitching heap of tangled metal appendages.  
"FUN! You call that FUN!" K yelled accusingly, getting up and jabbing a wing at Rayden. "You have a hole in your stomach big enough for me to crawl through! Half of your legs' muscle mass is still hanging off of the ice needles back in the battlefield! You've lost more blood in the last ten minutes than I have in my entire body! You call that FUN!"  
The target of K's ranting actually stopped and thought about the question, and then sighed. "Well, not THAT much fun. I mean, getting the kill is the best part, and I didn't get to kill anything today..." K's face darkened at Rayden's downcast expression. "But even so, what's the point in killing something that's pretty much asleep?"  
"How about the preservation of hundreds of innocent LIVES!" the metadragon snapped.  
Rayden shrugged. "Meh."  
"Okay, shut up you two," Ranma said suddenly, distracting the two non-humans. "I have an idea." He looked down at K. "Now, on an elemental table, this spell would be considered holy magic, right?"  
K blinked. "Uh... yeah. I mean, it's too powerful a healing spell to be rooted in ice magic."  
"Perfect," Ranma said, earning more confused looks from K and Rayden. "And the elemental opposite of holy magic is necromancy, right?"  
"Yesssss..." K drawled, wondering where Ranma was going with this. As holy and necromantic magics were each more refined forms of simple light and dark magics, the two mana types remained diametrically opposed.  
"Then it should be adversely affected by necromantic energies. And the healing spell would get all screwed up, right?"  
K sweatdropped. "Uhm... maybe. You'd need an actual mage to tell you that... but how are **you** going to harness necromancy and infuse it into the spell?"  
Ranma ignored him and pointed to Rayden. "You. C'mere."  
Rayden did as he was asked, though he shook his head as he approached. "I don't know how much you know about Dread Knights kid, but I **don't** do zombies or nothing. Actually, I don't even approve of those who do."  
"Yeah, whatever," the wanderer said dismissively. "Pick up the crystal and follow me. We're taking Miss Snow White here for a walk."

Some time later, K was busy contemplating the almost casual flashes of brilliance Ranma seemed so prone to having as they walked among the tattered corpses and charred craters of the Korean demilitarized zone. During the fight, a fight that even he had though he had little chance of winning, he had managed to shock his opponent time after time and strike while her guard was down. Even against a dragon, certainly one of the smarter of the numerous creatures in the realms, and one that had attacked him without mercy or quarter, he managed to outsmart it and turn the tables on it again and again. It really was remarkable.  
Especially when his ideas outside of combat were so very, very bad.  
"Am I the **only** one who think that this is all going to go horribly wrong?" the metadragon asked irritably, riding atop Ranma's head as the pigtailed boy forged the path ahead, slicing up any zombies that wandered nearby with a casual flare that made K uneasy and made Rayden impressed.  
"I think you are," Ranma said, stepping on the head of a juga upper torso that tried to crawl up on its belly to grab his legs. He put a slight twist into his foot as he drove the creature's skull down into the Earth, and smiled in satisfaction once the grasping claws fell limp, accompanied as they were by a loud cracking noise.  
"Gotta agree with him," Rayden said off-handedly as he shifted the large crystal he was carrying on his shoulder slightly, "it looks like it's working." Indeed, where Leia's body could best be described as "messed up" before, it had started to take on malformations that indicated a mutation into something truly horrendous. The spine had already grown past the pelvic region and was twisting about the other bones that should have been forming legs, and skeletal fragments that one would have called ribs when properly formed stuck out of the spinale column and curved in all directions, creating a series of wicked scythes along her back. The other portions of her body seemed to still be relatively unchanged at this point in the transformation, though that was most likely because of the severe battle damage Leia had already sustained.  
"I'm not ARGUING that your plan isn't doing very bad things to her healing spell, Ranma," the metadragon said in exasperation. "And I congratulate you for such an unorthodox use of mana pollution and whatnot... but even though your plan is going to work, I don't think you've fully considered what's actually going to HAPPEN."  
Ranma considered this for a moment. "Okay... do YOU know what's going to happen?"  
"Well, no, but-"  
"Then what're you complaining about?" Ranma said dismissively, idly kicking away another zombie that got too close. "It'll probably just end up killing her, like you said we should do."  
"And then it will probably RAISE her." K hissed, "or have you noticed that dead people around here have a habit of getting up and moving around?"  
"A brain-dead spellcaster isn't much of a threat," Ranma reasoned, causing his draconic companion to groan weakly.  
"And YOU!" K shouted, turning around to face Rayden. "What's with you? Not that I'm complaining, but why are you following Ranma's orders?"  
The demon hunter frowned. "What're you talking about? I don't take orders from-"  
"Shut up and put the crystal down," Ranma said suddenly, interrupting the larger man. Rayden did so immediately, and without uttering another word.  
K sweatdropped, and then bent his neck around so that he could speak right in Ranma's ear. "Hey... why IS he doing whatever you say?" the metadragon whispered.  
"I dunno," Ranma mumbled back quietly, "I guess 'cause I beat him up again. Doesn't really matter why." Then he cleared his throat and once again addressed the demon hunter. "Okay then; blast a big hole... uhm..." he fingered his lip as he turned and scanned the surrounding area. "Ah! Over there! Make a big crater right there!"  
Rayden nodded and calmly held his hands out in front of him, palms up, at about the level of his stomach. Then, closing his eyes, he began to chant. "Shadows, gather in my hand and unleash your hatred..." Darkness seeped up from around him and into his hands, like streams of ink flowing through the air, forming a sphere of black magic that had a blue glow around it.  
His eyes opened, and Ranma could see them flash red as the demon hunter threw his arms forward.  
"_Rune beam_!"  
KA-BLAAAM! A continuous beam of energy, just like the one he had seen used against Leia before, lashed out from Rayden's hands and stabbed into the devastated ground, exploding into a large cloud of dust and arcs of black lightning.  
Ranma didn't hesitate in walking up to the blast site, observing the results of the attack with satisfaction.  
"Perfect. Now put sleeping ugly here inside."  
Rayden didn't get the Walt Disney reference, but complied anyway, hauling the crystal back up, and then tossing it haphazardly into the hole.  
Thump! After the cell landed, Ranma immediately slid down the side of the crater, landed on top of the crystal, and removed something from his pocket.  
K, who had managed to keep his perch on Ranma's shoulder, blinked as Ranma took out a piece of paper and started writing on it. "Uh... hey... what're you doing?"  
Ranma continued writing as he answered. "Well, I thought a little bit about what you said, and you're sort of right; she might turn into something pretty bad while stuck in the crystal. Of couse, the way I figure it, as long the spell never finishes healing her, which we can all see it won't, she'll stay trapped in the crystal. Which means she'll be frozen unless something else frees her."  
K gaped as his companion, obviously impressed. "Oh... okay... then, what're you doing?" Could it be that Ranma was forging some sort of magic seal? Did he even HAVE that kind of power?  
"Writing a note that says: 'Danger! Don't open!'" Ranma explained.  
He ignored K as the metadragon fell face first off his shoulder.  
"Let's see... I should probably write it in different languages... I've got Japanese, English, Hebrew, some skewed Spanish... hmmm... I don't know the word for 'danger' in Chinese. I guess I can just stick to 'don't open'."  
Eventually, the pigtailed boy turned toward Rayden. "Hey, what languages do you know?"  
The demon hunter pointed to himself in confusion, and then spoke after a moment of thought. "Well... I'm fluent in Gaerieth, Temtrodaeel, Japanese, and English... I know some tribal lycanthro speech... and I can understand Hive. Mostly."  
"Great," Ranma said, not understanding half of what he had just heard, "write 'Danger! Don't open!' in as many languages as you can on this."  
As he handed Rayden a pen, K got back up from his facefault, sputtering incredulously. "What is this! You think a little handwritten note is going to stop anybody!"  
Ranma shrugged. "Well... it wouldn't stop ME, but who knows? Besides, this way whoever breaks her out can't claim they weren't warned."  
K lowered his head and covered it with his wings, unable to believe what he was hearing.  
"Done!" Rayden said, slapping the piece of paper across the face of the crystal. "Well... I understand Hive, but I can't read it... come to think of it, I don't even know if there IS a normal writing system for that... so I just drew some random glyphs I remember seeing the last time I was in a hive city."  
"Fair enough," Ranma said, shrugging. "Throw some dirt over her and then let's get a move on."  
K groaned as he realized that they were really going through with this. "Nobody EVER listens to me..." he mumbled. Naturally, he was ignored.

Ranma planted his hands on his hips as Rayden finished shoving dirt over the stasis crystal. "Hey, good work. By the way, it just occurred to me that we've fought against and alongside each other twice, and I don't know your name." He stuck out his hand in a Western greeting. "I'm Ranma Saotome: martial artist, treasure hunter, and hero-for-hire. You?"  
Rayden didn't hesitate to take his hand and shake it heartily, smiling. "I'm Rayden Shikodan: Dread Knight, demon slayer, and mercenary."  
Ranma nodded idly as he picked up K and started to walk away from the burial site. "Huh... no offense... well, if you TAKE offense at this kind of thing, but, you don't really strike me as a 'God of Destruction' cultist nut."  
The demon hunter looked honestly surprised at this, and scratched the back of his head nervously. "I don't? I mean... well... really?"  
"Nah. I mean, don't get me wrong, you have the whole 'dark power' and 'thirst for blood' thing going on. But you don't really seem... how should I put this... evil. Ill-tempered and pointlessly violent, sure, but not EVIL, ya know?"  
"Oh. That." Rayden shrugged it off as he followed the pigtailed boy back through the wastes. "I don't worry about people's ideas of 'good' and 'evil', really. The whole idea is overblown as it is, really."  
"Huh. You're not going to start preaching about the balance of dark and light in the universe and how morality is only a matter of who's left alive after a conflict, are you?" Ranma said.  
Rayden blinked. "Uhm... well... I **could**... but it sounds to me like you've heard it already."  
"Yeah. Keep it to yourself." The two fighters spent the rest of the walk in relative silence, with K occasionally complaining about the current state of affairs. They ignored him.

"You is certain of this?" Master Matsute said calmly, sitting cross-legged on the tatami mat in the new Shisou clan meeting room.  
"There's really no other alternative," Ranma insisted, squatting before the man who had acted as his teacher for a rather short period of time. "There's no way I can stay here. Somebody's after me, and they're dangerous. If I stay, it will only put you and everyone else in more danger."  
"Ranma, you not responsible for what happen here," the Ninja master insisted, not wanting to let his new prize student leave so quickly. Especially after fending off a dragon! That could earn serious reputation points for the Shisou clan!  
"I know it's not my fault. Directly. But that doesn't matter." Ranma sighed and lowered his head. "So long as I stay here you're in danger of attack. I'm sure that snow dragon wasn't the only lizard this Greken jerk has hunting me."  
"Then, you will not even stay for funerals of those fallen?"  
Ranma nodded somberly. "If I stay long enough to attend funerals, I'm afraid I'll just end up having to attend a lot more of them."  
The pigtailed boy got up, stood at attention, and then bowed down toward Matsute. "I'm not really good at saying goodbyes... but Master, I want you to know that I've learned a lot here. And I will not let your teachings go to waste."  
Matsute took a long look at Ranma, then nodded slowly. "I see this. Very well. Ancient proverb say: 'Man who open mind overcome many trial and learn many skill... and eventually die anyway.'"  
Ranma sweatdropped. "Thanks for the pep talk. I think I'm going to go say the rest of my goodbyes now."  
Not waiting to be dismissed, Ranma straightened up and turned toward the new quarters that were being set up throughout the office building chosen to be the new Shisou headquarters.

Natalie, who had been silent throughout the whole exchange, finally spoke. "Master Matsute... do you really think he'll be okay? Being hunted by dragons... isn't it safer for him to hide out here?"  
The Ninja master shook his head. "Maybe... but is not for us to decide. Man like Ranma... has fate greater than any one of us. Such man tangled in affairs of demons and dragons... who we to tempt greatest forces in realms? Is conflict beyond us. Ranma fate beyond us."  
The female trainee frowned. "Fate... you think Ranma has some greater role?"  
Matsute nodded. "Maybe it superstition. Maybe I just getting old. But one thing certain, Ranma fate involve many explosions we not survive easy. Ancient proverb say: 'Destiny is bitch.'"  
Natalie sweatdropped. "Right... I think I'll be going now, Master," she drawled, turning toward the stairwell.  
"Actually, there other ancient proverb that say-"  
"GOOD NIGHT, Master!"

Pow! Pow! Pow! Whump! Pow!  
Ranma backhanded Tad across the face, causing the unstable young man to spin around in place. Then he planted his fist solidly in Tad's gut, causing him to double over in agony.  
"Now Tad, seeing how this is goodbye, I wanted to make sure you knew why I'm doing this." Ranma said conversationally, occasionally eyeing the smashed remains of Tad's latest undead spider for any signs of un-life.  
"Be-Because it's the l-last time you'll g-get the ch-chance?" Tad stuttered weakly, shaking slightly from the strikes he had already suffered.  
"Yes. But mostly because you're stupid and annoying, and because I don't have the ethical wherewithal to spare you from responsibility for your actions just because you're actually retarded."  
Tad sniffled, though it was unclear whether it was from sorrow or pain. "I'll miss you too, buddy!"  
Thock! "AUGH! My spleen!"

Ranma descended the stairs with an extra spring in his step, happy enough about beating a man who had never caused him intentional harm that he had mostly forgotten about having to leave the friends he had made among the Shisou, as well as the incident that had ended with some of those same friends dead.  
When he saw Natalie waiting for him outside her room, he sobered up slightly. She was one of the ones he would miss, but she was also the one life he had managed to directly save that day.  
"Soooo... I guess this is g'bye, then," Ranma said awkwardly, scratching the back of his head. Saying goodbye to girls was always harder than guys.  
Natalie nodded expressionlessly. "Yes, it is. I wish you luck, Ranma. And I hope we meet again sometime."  
He smiled, glad that she wasn't going to end up complicating the encounter. "Yeah, that'd be cool. Thanks for all your help! See ya!"  
He had just passed by her when the female trainee spoke again. "You're leaving tomorrow morning, correct?"  
Ranma blinked. "Uh, yeah. I won't make it very far tonight if I left now. Kinda drained from the fight and all."  
"I see..." Natalie turned and gently took his hand, entwining his fingers in her own. "In case we don't meet again... could you grant me a favor and... extend your goodbye?"  
"Eh?" Ranma mumbled as warning alarms went off in his head. "Whazzat mean?"  
Rather than explaining, Natalie instead grabbed Ranma around the head and kissed him hungrily, pressing her body against him as she did so.  
"Mmph! Mlhhg!" Ranma mumbled in surprise, failing to get any words past Natalie's tongue as his arms flailed wildly up and down in their typical "surprise affection attack victim" reflex.  
Eventually she pulled back, and her chest heaved against his as she took several deep breaths.  
"It's unfortunate that you're mostly out of energy..." she said huskily, one hand playing with Ranma's pigtail while the other sank down to caress his lower regions. "So you just relax and let me do the work, okay?"  
"C-Can't we j-just be friends?" Ranma squeaked out, cutting short his usual spiel about liking her but having to leave in order to match the pace at which she was seducing him.  
"Of course we can just be friends!" The voluptuous Ninja assured him, smiling. "Just think of this as... an expression of gratitude."  
Without allowing him time for more than a nervous chuckle, she then yanked him into her new bedroom, slamming the door shut and locking it a moment later.

American military research base. Codename: Delta Prime. Location: India highlands. Primary function: central base for research team Delta, designated as the U.S. government's primary researchers of mana-based artifact recovery and analysis.  
"So these networks of gateways act as inter-system rifts, offering instaneous travel between different systems, or realms," one soldier explained carefully as he cleaned his T-21 magitek rifle. "The Nexus is actually a cluster of gateways, which indicates that at some point in the past, Earth was actually used as a gathering point, or maybe connecting realm, for the types of creatures that are pouring out of it now. I mean, that could explain why there are so many more stories about demons and spirits in Japanese lore than in western lore."  
The two soldiers sitting next to him, who had been listening quietly, didn't seem impressed by his insight.  
One of them spoke up. "You know, something I've always wondered is: if this Nexus thing leads to other dimensions, how come NONE of them came up with guns? I mean, if no other race had laser-guided missiles or something, that wouldn't be weird, but are pistols really that complicated?"  
The first soldier rolled his eyes. "No, no... look, the Nexus doesn't lead to 'parallel dimensions' or universes or anything. It acts as a gateway between REALMS, which our scientists are guessing are actually other solar systems. The Nexus bends time and space to glue two separate points in the REAL universe together on some minor sub-plane, so that when you walk through it..."  
The man trailed off as he realized that both his companions were anxiously scratching their heads, obviously not understanding.  
He sighed. "Okay, look at it this way: It's like Stargate SG-1, not like Sliders."  
"Oh! Now I get it!" The others said immediately.  
The one who had spoken up before then looked thoughtful. "But... wait. Wouldn't that make the demons and monsters aliens, instead?"  
"They ARE aliens," the first soldier said dryly. "They're strange, foreign creatures not from this planet who have come here through artificial means; just because they don't fly in space ships or use laser guns doesn't make them any less alien."  
"I get that," the other soldier who had not yet posed a question asked, "but where does Quantum Leap fit into all this?"  
"It DOESN'T," the first soldier said sharply. "There's no time travel involved."  
"But, what about-"  
"NO TIME TRAVEL!" The man shouted, causing his companion to flinch back.

The Major in charge of the base's usual security entered the tent just as the discussion was winding down, his rifle already loaded and at the ready.  
"Look alive, boys! We've got something incoming, and it 'aint human!"  
The three men quickly got on their feet and began loading and checking their weapons, fully alert.  
The Major nodded to them. "We have a high-energy reading four clicks east of here, and incoming fast! The base shield is online, but if the energy signature doesn't attack then we're going to-"  
BWOOM! Vmmmmmm...  
A loud explosion was followed by the noisy hum of the base's dome deflector grid repelling the attack, and all the soldiers felt their hair rise as the energy bleed from the grid released a surge of static.  
"Well, I think we don't have to worry about it not attacking," one of the men said irritably, cocking his gun.  
The Major was about to issue another command, when several bright flashes of light seemed to engulf the area outside the tent in pure white.  
VOOOOOOoooooooom  
A low-pitched whine was all the warning the soldiers got as the protective dome over the base buckled under the energies bombarding it, a full four seconds after the beginning of the assault.  
"It... It failed? Already? ... Not possible..." the Major mumbled, drunkenly turning toward the tent entrance, as if he was in a dream.  
His vision was instantly awash with white light, and as he squinted against the brightness, his numb mind noticed that it was actually getting... brighter.  
KA-SHRAK!

Demetrius would have grinned as several cloth tents were engulfed in hellfire, had his current form possessed the ability to manipulate such muscles.  
"BY THE ORDER OF MY LORD AND MASTER," his gargled voice boomed, and the psilor threw his arms out to the sides, huge spheres of pure energy gathering around his relatively small appendages of impure energy.  
"BURN..." A flick of the wrist, and laser-like streaks flashed through the air, cutting into the primary research station and tearing it apart.  
"SUFFER..." A swing of his left arm sent a spiralling ball of power down on the vehicle depot, causing ribbons of electricity to leap out and spread upon impact, killing technicians and mechanics instantly before leaping toward new victims.  
"**DIE**." Spreading his arms and legs out, several spheres of light gathered in the air around his body, gathering energy to unleash more destructive beams of power.  
In the distance, computer technicians struggled to bring the shield back online, to activate the base's automated defense systems, and to activate the new experimental defense drones that were designed to rush to the rescue and support the troops in defense of the station. Some of those technicians would even succeed. But none would survive.  
"I MISSED THIS... AH, THE WONDERS OF WAR! COME, LITTLE MEN! **SEE** THE DOOM OF YOUR PITIFUL ARMY! WEEP! TREMBLE! PERISH!"

End Chapter 7 


	8. Dawn of Chaos

Species: Psionic Corteus  
Common name: Psilor  
Class: Demon - Energy base psychic pattern  
Subspecies: None. All psilors have the exact same physical energy makeup, with any deviation in ability or appearance based on personal preferences, experience, and power levels.  
Sentience & Intelligence: High. Psilors are judged to be just as intelligent as humans, with much higher general potential. However, it appears that a psilor's ability and affinity for reasoning and thought is based entirely upon the individual's preferences and experiences with subjects such as study and debate as the organism reaches maturity, just like how a human child's future study habits and preferences are heavily influenced by outside influences during immaturity. The difference being that there is a significant genetic influence and disposition to be considered in humans that is not a factor in psilors. Unfortunately for the species, psilors share the environment and experiences most common to demons, and thus have a strong preference toward violence, very little love for science and study, and the usual moral shortcomings and arrogance issues portrayed by most demonic beings.  
Physical biology: Psilors are energy-based life-forms that exist as an unstable energy wavelength pattern maintained by a psychic sentience, or, for lack of a better term, a "soul". As this form is unstable, psilors must adapt a physical form in order to survive for an extended period of time.  
Mana resonance: Extremely high. Psilors usually cannot use normal pattern magic, because their psychic abilities resonate so closely to mana wavelengths that they are unable to distinguish the two for the purposes of casting spells. Most psilors thus rely on their psychic abilities, which channel mana naturally to create the desired effects. Some psilors have been known to use clerical magic, alchemic magic, and other forms of manacraft that don't involve regular patterning, but they show no particular affinity for these skills.  
Lifespan: No known natural lifespan.  
Diet: In their natural forms, psilors absorb and bleed energy at such rapid rates that any additional external sources of energy are unnecessary. In their physical forms, a psilor is limited to whatever biology is possessed by their chosen species, and will usually eat within the typical diet of that species.  
Biological anomalies: Psilors are shapeshifters, utilizing a magic-based ability to convert the raw energy they possess and phase it into solid matter. The mechanics of this ability are unknown, though it has been ascertained that there is a general limitation of mass somewhere around the realm of 250 kilograms. The physical extent to which the psilor replicates the species' makeup is dependant upon the power of the psilor; a young psilor's physical body is little more than a fragile shell which will lack even the strength and endurance of the weakest of a given species. As a psilor becomes more experienced, it will toughen its physical form to the standards of its chosen species and began to duplicate that species' natural abilities, though this may take significant time (I.E., it takes a short time for a psilor to reach the toughness and strength of a human being, but it's much harder to duplicate a gorgon, and even harder to duplicate a gorgon's neuro-somatic ability to turn creatures to stone). After a long enough time in a given body, a psilor will eventually began building on that species' natural abilities, growing tougher and more resistant to damage, while adapting more of its psychic skills for use in that form.  
Reproductive type: Sexual meiosis. As it so happens, psilors themselves cannot maintain a pregnancy, as their unstable nature would destroy an embryo before it got the chance to develop further. Thus, psilors that take a female form, or equivalent form that represents a gender capable of reproduction, are unable to procreate. Psilors that take a male form, however, may impregnate females from the chosen species. In the cases of a successful impregnation, it is estimated there is a 80 chance that the fetus will develop to be a normal member of the base species. In the remaining 20 of the cases, the fetus is subjected to a crippling psychic implosion which instantly consumes the fetus and the birth mother, and then breaks apart into an unstable energy pattern, I.E., a "baby" psilor.  
Social structure: Psilors can only mimic those species it has seen before and has had some experience and contact with, as a fair understanding of the original species' biology is required in order to create a functional physical copy (this is usually developed from instinctual psychic scans, so a new psilor will be able to mimic a subject species well enough to survive before it breaks apart). Some psilors grow up amongst a multitude of creatures, and may then either choose a favorite species or choose to shift between them, forsaking the advantages of biological familiarity for a wide range of species to mimic with efficiency. Most psilors, though, grow up among a certain type of species, or among other psilors that have chosen a certain type of species to mimic, and inevitably end up preferring that form to all others, as well as taking on many of the characteristics of that species, such as diet, temperament, choice of crafts, and breeding preference. Of course, psilors are demons, and are usually far more powerful than the species they are mimicking, so a psilor organism developing among natural members of its chosen species will likely end up conquering or commanding the dwelling.  
Combat analysis: Varies from high to extremely high. There is no known way to destroy a psilor that has reverted to its unstable energy state, and although it is commonly believed that a psilor can only enter this state briefly before breaking apart due to instability, the attempted holding and unsuccessful execution of Demetrius Yaermon has cast this theory in doubt. Psilors are relatively vulnerable in their physical states, although the extent of their abilities is extremely hard to judge. Suggested engagement methods are assassination and guerrilla tactics. While psychic engagements and warfare have proven very effective as well, such methods are considered too unreliable and experimental.  
Misc. notes: Although highly psychic, the psilor's abilities are inexplicably introverted in nature, with the entirety of an organism's psychic presence being used to maintain its stability and power up attacks. Psilors show no talent for telepathy, and while all their energy-based attacks involve the manipulation of psychic energies, they possess no inherent attacks which specifically affect the minds of others (though such skills may be gained through certain spellcrafts). However, their psychic sensitivity makes them extremely susceptible to other psychics attacking them; the problem being that depending on the skill and experience of the psilor, an attack can either take them by complete surprise, or allow the chance for the attacked psilor to exercise the full strength of its psychic abilities through the forced link to the attacker. Obviously, caution must be used when dealing with these organisms, as they possess the full range of violent and arrogant attitudes common to demonic species.

US Research Division Omega - Survey file E159

Nexus II  
by Black Dragon  
http/ am sad to say that I do not own Ranma. I own pretty much everyone else, though. Ha ha! Eat it, you glory-mongering, legitimate, salaried anime creators!

" " human languages, " " demonic languages or languages different than the one in common use in a given scene, writing, ( ) smart-ass author comments, sounds.  
If I don't happen to mention which language in particular is being spoken, then it's not important anyway.

Chapter 8

Doppler sighed deeply as he looked at the large blast craters that dotted the small area that had housed the American military research camp and shook his head sadly. Everywhere he looked, there was devastation; the soldiers' barracks had either been disintegrated or sliced into, with thick carpets of blood and ash laid on the ground. The power and shield generators had been annihilated, small scraps of charred and molten metal being all that remained. The base's defense robots, a fairly new and experimental type of technology, had likewise been crushed, their sophisticated weapons and systems now far beyond any hope of salvage.  
What really stood out among the carnage though, and what had the demon mage clenching all four of his fists in barely restrained rage was the remains of the artifact tent. Scraps of burnt canvas, blackened chunks of dirt and concrete, and shattered human remains mixed into the same mess of debris as priceless and potentially powerful artifacts and items, which had now been rendered indistinguishable from the rest of the rubble.  
"Aaaah... such a fine battle," came a content sigh from behind the mage.  
Doppler twitched. "'Battle'? You call this a 'battle'?"  
The psilor laughed as he floated several feet above the ground in his natural energy state, arm crossed over his chest. "You're correct, of course! What is this but complete slaughter? These shameful humans couldn't touch me, even with the help of their infernal machines!"  
"Stop laughing, you imbecile!" Doppler snapped, causing Demetrius to blink in surprise. "Your idiocy is beyond my comprehension! How could you have allowed this to happen!"  
Demetrius stared dumbly at the four-armed mage. "Allowed what to happen? Wasn't my objective to slay the humans?" He was not only confused as to what the veirheelu was angry about, but also that he was angry at all. Demetrius had known Doppler off and on for millennia, but he had never seen the other demon lord lose his temper before.  
"'Slay the humans,' yes!" Doppler said angrily, pointing toward the artifact tent, the generators, and the robots all at once while also shaking a fist at the psilor. "But you've also annihilated anything of WORTH in this camp! The artifacts! The technology! I can't make use of a wagon full of burnt scrap metal! What's wrong with you!"  
Demetrius' eyes narrowed as he decided he didn't like being talked to this way. "But 'master'," he said mockingly, "you gave no orders to preserve certain structures."  
"**Yes**, I **did**," Doppler deadpanned. "Orders that I now see you weren't paying attention to." His own eyes narrowed. "I have no use for a mindless butcher, Yaermon. I can build those whenever I wish. You'd best prove yourself to be more competent in the future."  
Zoosh! A blaze of blue flame suddenly encircled Demetrius, and the fingers of one of his hands elongated into vicious-looking claws. "Do not trifle with me, you-"  
"My Lord Thaeramon," Tio said suddenly, interrupting the two demon lords just as it seemed they were about to rip into each other, "it would seem there is a secondary storage bunker underneath the power station."  
Doppler blinked, and quickly turned, ignoring the fact that he had his back turned to his ungrateful servant. "Really? Yaermon missed one?"  
"It would seem so," the devil hybrid said. "Doubtless there's little in it as valuable as the artifacts from one of the main tents, but there are several stores of assorted gems and gold that do not warrant study, some baubles which they determined were dangerous or did not wish to study further, and a back-up of their computer files."  
Demetrius let his aura fizzle as he watched Doppler's face light up. "What... What is a 'back-up of computer files'?"  
"It involves machines and human technology," Doppler said off-handedly, "not something you'd know what to do with. Tio, secure the contents of the bunker, and get that data to Tarmin. I've got to sift through this rubble and see if anything survived."  
Demetrius made an irritated grunting sound. "And have you a task for me?"  
"Yes: get out of my sight," the veirheelu snapped. "You've done quite enough here. I will contact you again when I require senseless destruction."  
The psilor lord debated then and there whether to attack his master, kill the fool, and take the bunker's treasures to fund his own purposes. Ultimately he relented, however. It was doubtful these humans possessed anything of significant value. Turning away from his master, Demetrius took the air, speeding away from the camp.

Doppler cast an annoyed glance in the psilor's direction as he left, having easily picked up his servant's intentions via his own telepathic powers. 'Not that the fool made it a big secret,' he thought. He had seen Tio getting ready to jump between the two demon lords should Demetrius attack; not a wise thing to do, as the devil couldn't possibly hurt Demetrius, and as Doppler knew how to cast the psilor down with but a moment.  
"Yaermon tries my patience," Doppler finally said, grasping two arms behind his back as he caught up to Tio. "However, I believe disposing of him personally would be a waste. I have put SO much effort into him so far."  
Tio raised an eyebrow; it was unusual for a master of deceit to be asking a warrior such as himself for advice. "Is there no way to humble the fool?"  
"You cannot humble a beast like that," Doppler explained, "you can only wound its pride. A wound that it will inevitably try to pay back."  
Tio nodded slowly. Then he cleared his throat loudly, immediately attracting his master's attention. "When you asked me to assist the destruction of the dark angels on Tithrees, I bore witness to a very interesting practice of the harlock natives living there. There was a type of beast that was commonly kept as a pet there for the purposes of hunting and fighting; some type of monstrous wolf, I believe. These wolves were selected from the pack by the sole virtue of their resilience and aggression, and raised as pets. However, the creatures would always begin to think themselves above their harlock masters, and begin to fight their captivity and snap at their owners, becoming a danger to the natives."  
Doppler nodded, greatly interested.  
"When that happened, it was common custom to seek out a pack of the monster wolves, bathe the pet in meat oils, and then set it upon the pack. And, after a bloody and entertaining slaughter, the owners of the deceased animal could select their next pet from the remnants of the pack that had killed it, having bore witness to their ferocity."  
Again the demon lord nodded. "So I should throw Demetrius to the wolves, so to speak?"  
The devil lowered his head in response. "I do not think to advise you, Master, but merely tell a story."  
Doppler snickered. "Very well. As you would have it, then." Then the veirheelu gazed upward toward the horizon and the rising sun. "It's a very interesting story... and I have just the wolf to set mine upon..."  
­­­

Ranma put a hand up to shield his eyes from the sun as he scanned the horizon, his pack resting on one shoulder. "So tell me again where this dragon keeper is supposed to be? We seem pretty far out from any major war zones or cities to be within range of assassination."  
"When the creatures trying to kill you are dragons, I don't think it really counts as 'assassination'," K noted from where he was perched on the pack. "You know, what with slaughtering of upwards of two dozen people to try and get you to come to them?"  
Standing behind them, Rayden shrugged. "Hey, if it works..."  
"It didn't work."  
"Oh. Right," Rayden mumbled, scratching his chin.  
"Anyway, I have no idea where Dashtall is supposed to live, but it can't be that hard to find him. Demon Lords aren't really known for being low-key, you know?" K said, stretching out his wings.  
Ranma nodded slowly. "Okay... well, I know he's not on the Japanese islands... and I would have heard of any dragon holds or nests in the territories in Korea and China... That leaves us either going north toward Russia, or West into Mongolia."  
K frowned. "You know... I know of a city in Northern China where they'd know all about the demon lords around here."  
Rayden immediately grunted in disgust. "Urgh. You don't mean Taer'Kul, do you?" Grimacing, the dark paladin shook his head. "Rotten place, that. Can't even walk nearby without a dozen monks or priests looking down their noses at you and lecturing you about their stupid 'good' religions."  
"Really? I couldn't imagine why a worshipper of one of the eight Dark Gods wouldn't be welcome there," K said sarcastically.  
Ranma suddenly stopped. "Ah hah! That reminds me!"  
Then he turned around and pointed at Rayden. "Why are you here, exactly? And why are you following us?"  
Rayden blinked, and pointed at himself. "Me? Er... I dunno. It seemed like a good idea."  
"A good idea?" K deadpanned. "He's a lone wanderer who's being actively hunted down by a dragon tamer. Not to mention he's kicked your arse twice when you fought."  
"Well, yeah," Rayden nodded, as if K's words supported his point. "Honestly, I kinda like him. And I hafta respect anyone who can put me down like he did back in Seoul."  
"And the part about being hunted by ridiculously powerful beings?" K asked, unconvinced.  
"Well, duh. That's the best part!" Rayden said, grinning. "Assassination attempts means plenty of hardened killers to slaughter without any dumb legal or moral issues. Beats searching for fights any day."  
"Fair enough," Ranma decided, "but why should I let you come with us?" Then his eyes narrowed as he crossed his arms over his chest.  
Rayden blinked again. "What? Why wouldn't you?"  
"First of all, I prefer traveling alone," Ranma noted. "Second of all, even if you did help out with the snow dragon, you didn't make a wonderful first or second impression. I can't say I'm very impressed with your abilities, or that I'd like having you around. And third of all, I'm the sort of fighter that performs heroic and charitable deeds and puts his life in danger for the greater good and all that stuff. Hanging around with a demonic knight sort of puts a damper on that image, y'know?"  
"I-I can put my life in danger for the greater good!" The dark paladin insisted. "In fact, I can do that part for you! So you can take care of the heroic and charitable deeds, and I can put my life on the line!"  
"... Fourth of all, you really don't seem that bright," Ranma said honestly, causing Rayden to sweatdrop. "I already have to baby-sit the lizard here. I don't want to have another burden to take care of."  
Ignoring K's indignant outrage, Rayden crossed his own arms over his chest. "I've been traveling in the wilderness for as long as you have! Longer, probably! In some of the harshest realms there are! I can take care of myself just fine!"  
"Oh? Then why do you want to join me so badly?" Ranma countered.  
Rayden frowned and scratched his head. "Well... to be honest... I don't really have anywhere to go. I need some direction. And I need conflict."  
"Conflict?" Ranma asked, raising an eyebrow.  
Rayden nodded. "Conflict leads to fighting. The more I fight, the stronger I get. And looking for fights has a lot of disadvantages." He grimaced as he thought of the dryad village, and of the trainee Ninja from the bar. Such weak creatures weren't worth his time, and there was a chance that killing them would have agitated his conscience.  
Ranma considered the larger man's words carefully. "So... you're looking for someone to lead you into a fight?"  
"Basically," Rayden admitted. "Though, I really do want to help you out, if I can. Preferably in a way that involves me killing things."  
Ranma nodded slowly. This wasn't looking like such a bad deal after all. "Okay then... do you have any useful skills besides the swordsmanship and the dark magic?"  
"Uhm..." Rayden began to bigsweat. "Non-fighting skills? ... Er, I can speak and read several languages! Mostly demonic and tribal stuff..."  
"Already got me a translator," Ranma said easily, idly petting K. "Anything else?"  
"How about an ancient, semi-sentient weapon of indescribable power?" Rayden asked, pointing to the sword still strapped to his back.  
The pigtailed man shook his head. "While interesting, that fits neatly into the swordsmanship thing."  
"Damn..." Rayden started to panic as he wrung his hands. "Uh... I don't sleep!"  
Ranma raised an eyebrow. "Say what?"  
"I don't sleep. I can't, really. It's a side effect of my demonic regeneration combining with my human body." Rayden explained, looking slightly flushed.  
Ranma considered this for a moment. "So, is this an advantage, or a problem, or what?"  
"I dunno. A point of interest? I could do nighttime sentry duty!"  
The pigtailed man sighed and turned around. "Look, it's nothing personal, but unless you can actually make yourself useful outside of battle, I'd rather not have you around all the time."  
Rayden sighed, and his expression started to look downcast, when a thought suddenly occurred to him. "I know! I can cook!"  
"You COOK?" Ranma asked, surprised.  
"Oh, yeah! All sorts of stuff! Field rations, preserved foods, wild animals, grocer items... I even know some fancy dishes from Gaer and the Empire! You ever heard of sushi?"  
Ranma sweatdropped. "Heard of it... yeah... you can make that sort of thing?"  
"Whaddya know. Unholy Dread Knight of the dark gods, and traveling Iron Chef, all in one," K mumbled. "How'd you end up with that skill set?"  
Rayden shrugged. "I spend a LOT of time killing things. And afterward, well... it's always best not to waste the dead bodies, right?"  
Ranma looked thoughtful as he mulled it over. Naturally, he was himself familiar with survival cooking, but it actually sounded as if the half-demon towering over him was good at it. And food WAS pretty important. "One thing. You don't eat humans, do you?"  
"Ugh. Never," Rayden said, looking disgusted. "I said I was a cook, remember? Cooks don't deal with human meat."  
"They don't?"  
"Nah. There are only two or three decent recipes that call for human as a primary ingredient, and I hear they're nothing spectacular," the dark paladin explained, "the vast majority of man-eating monsters eat humans raw. Except trolls, that is. But then, trolls have such a pitiful sense of taste and smell that they-"  
"Okay, okay, fine. Shut up," Ranma finally said, causing the larger man to fall quiet. "All right, so you might actually come in handy. I have to converse with my dragon before I officially decide."

Rayden sat down on a nearby rock as Ranma walked out of earshot, K riding on his shoulder.  
'Weird. Why should the lizard get a say in whether I join up with them or not?' He thought, scratching his head. 'Eh. Then again, I'm the one asking to travel with them. Guess they can run things how they want.'  
Then the swordsman stared at Ranma's back, and his eyes were eventually drawn to the pigtailed man's sword.  
'Hm. Enchanted mithril, I'm guessing. Flimsy design, though it must've had a wallop of a spell cast on it to stay effective in that kinda shape.' Rayden had never understood the appeal of Japanese blades, as they were usually too light to lend significant weight to a blow, and too thin to withstand much damage in a block without breaking. Never mind that such weapons were intended to be wielded two-handed despite their light weight, which made wielding a second weapon or a shield problematic.  
'Still... he's really good with it. And he's so fast! I guess the light swords work better at that speed...' Rayden began to muse over his battles with the young wanderer, and started to analyze Ranma's technique as he remembered the tactics used.  
'He is very fast... but with those special attacks, he can still pack a lotta punch without having to rely on brute force. That _dragon fist_ could probably rip through a golem... where did an Earth realm human learn something like that, anyway?'  
His expression hardened. 'That's it, then! If this kid can become so strong without using magic, then he's the perfect guy to hang with! I have to get them to let me tag along!'  
"ALL RIGHT! FINE!" Ranma suddenly shouted, making Rayden jerk his head around to stare at the pigtailed man.  
"YES, I NAILED NATALIE! ALL THE WAY! ALL RIGHT! YOU HAPPY! WE WERE BOUNCING LIKE RABBITS! IS THAT WHAT YOU WANTED TO HEAR!" Ranma glared indignantly as K hovered in front of his face, looking shocked by the sudden outburst.  
K continued hovering silently, apparently stunned. Then, after a moment, he shook his head as if to clear it. "Whoa. Nice going. So, did the ol' nightstick get any polish?"  
Ranma blanched and jerked backward, his face reddening. "The hell! A-Aren't you supposed to be a kid! What's wrong with you!"  
"I blame modern television," the metadragon answered immediately, proving that it was a well-practiced excuse. "Oh! And the internet."  
"Uh... hey... excuse me?" Rayden said hesitantly, waving a hand slowly. "So, did you decide, or what?"  
"It wasn't a decision, it was confirmation," K said. "I was pretty sure they did the horizontal tango, but with this guy you have to interrogate 'im afterwards to make sure he didn't chicken out."  
"Gah! You're so annoying!"  
"Actually... I was talking about me joining up with you guys..." Rayden said hesitantly, being quite unsure as to what was going on.  
Ranma and K stared back at him. Then Ranma smacked a clenched hand into his palm. "Ah! Right! Yeah, okay, you're in. Just gotta lay down some ground rules, is all."  
"Eh? Like what?"  
Ranma smirked and wagged a finger in the air. "I can't just up and take anyone along with me. I got enemies, you know? So while we're traveling, I'm going to have to insist that I be appointed 'team leader,' and that you do what I say all the time."  
"Fair enough."  
"Also, I'll be in charge of rationing food, supplies, and funds, so I'll need all your food and money," the pigtailed man asked.  
"Can I keep my booze?"  
"I wouldn't take it if you asked," Ranma deadpanned. "Also, because you have a stronger constitution and don't seem to lose function in your body from having large holes punched in your torso, I'm nominating you as the meat shield."  
"Neat! What's that?" the demon knight inquired as K sweatdropped.  
"That means that you take the front when we're traveling or fighting, so you're always the closest one to the action!" Ranma explained optimistically. "Coincidentally, that means you'll also be drawing the most fire, be the first to take the hit from enemy barrages, trigger all the traps, and likely stumble into delicate and dangerous situations and places far ahead of those of us competent enough to deal with them the right way."  
"Gotta take the good with the bad. Anything else?"  
"I'll have your power of attorney, and the ability to sign contracts and deals in your name."  
"Sounds like that has to do with important and complicated Earth laws, which I know nothing about. Sure."  
"First dibs on treasure."  
"Done."  
"Absolute authority on expenses, mission contracts, traveling direction and destinations..."  
"I don't see why not."  
"You must tell me anything I want to know about you, your past, or anyone or anything you know about upon request."  
"Well, that's a given."  
"You may not join, work for, or be affiliated with any other official party or organization without my permission."  
Rayden frowned at this, and stopped to consider the statement. Which surprised Ranma, who had assumed the larger man wasn't listening and was just nodding along with what he was told.  
"Does the Third Brotherhood count? I kind of want to keep my membership with them. It's an important 'destined hero' kind of thing, you know?"  
"Well... I guess I can let you stay in with them..." Honestly, Ranma was a bit worried about being associated with a dark cult. He didn't know much about the Brotherhoods, but he was pretty sure they had poor public relations. "Wait. Demons have heroes?"  
"Of course demons have heroes!" Rayden said indignantly. "It's just that demonic heroes are less about selfless acts of courage and leadership and more about efficiently slaughtering huge groups of enemies single-handedly."  
Ranma stared at the demon knight, and Rayden sweatdropped. "What?"  
"You see, it's stuff like that. That's why I'm hesitant about this," Ranma muttered. "But anyway, since you agreed to sign over everything but your soul, you're in. We're still goin' to Taer'Kul though." Then he frowned. "Do either of you guys know any villages or outposts on the way? We left Seoul in a hurry and I didn't get to resupply."  
"Dalarin," Rayden answered immediately. "Standard small human settlement. Probably good for buying gear on the way to the cities."  
"All right then," Ranma said, hefting his pack and tossing it to Rayden. "You carry our gear and lead the way! We're going to Dalarin!"

Dum da da-dum! Rayden Shikodan has joined the party!  
"What was that?"  
"Nothing. Ignore it."  
­­­

Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! The sound of powerful wings pounding the air alerted those few townsfolk below who were not already aware of the dragon's approach, and dozens of eyes scanned the sky nervously as a black, sinewy shape cut a swath through the roiling dark red clouds that perpetually blanketed the village and its neighboring settlements.  
The mighty creature made no other noise as it flew through the air, not deigning to waste its breath on terrifying roars or flashy aerobatics as it streaked toward its home. Many of the other dragons that shared the region did so at every opportunity, and took great pleasure in frightening the spit out of the helpless farmers and merchants below. This one, however, took to his work with great seriousness and dignity, which had helped him gather significant esteem among his peers. Even when his work amounted to monotonous scouting and communication tasks, he would perform to the greatest of his abilities. Such qualities were unusual to dragons, and, as it so happened, were greatly preferred of servants.

Down below, one old man raised his eyebrows as he watched the otherwordly serpent cross the length of the township, zipping away toward the dark, looming mountain fortress in the center of the region's settlements.  
'Hmmm... definitely black color... too thin to be a shadow dragon or an ash serpent... has wings...'  
"Father!" A young woman shouted from a nearby doorway, timidly searching the sky as she beckoned to the man. "Father, come in, quickly! You know it's dangerous to be outside with the serpents overhead!"  
"A venom dragon," the man said aloud, though it seemed as if he was speaking to himself. "Definitely a venom dragon. Ah! Must be Vargas!"  
"Father?" The woman asked hesitantly, making sure that the creature was far enough past the town's border before coming outside herself.  
While the people living in the settlements around Dashtall's castle were considered to be his property, and thus the dragons that were under the demon lord's thrall were technically forbidden to terrorize and harm them without cause, it was not at all uncommon for some of the more impulsive dragons to "cheat" a little bit and snatch up a human peasant or simply cause panic just for kicks. Such acts were supposedly punished in some manner back in the dragons' nests, but generally the families of those eaten on a whim had their doubts as to whether the measures were effective, as it kept happening over and over again.  
"Father, come inside. You know the dragons have been very active lately. It's not safe to be outside if you're not going somewhere."  
The old man nodded as he stared off in the direction of the castle. "Yes, yes, I know. Strange, that. I've been looking into it."  
The young woman looked alarmed. "What! Father, you musn't! You could be killed!"  
"Bah! I'm as likely to be killed for taking a walk as I am for speaking to the soldiers. So why not?" The man turned around to face his daughter. "Thirty-six dragons, all fliers, spread across the land and given orders to lay low and search. Dozens of grend and lizard man kill squads. Bounties. Spies. Hired assassins." He snorted. "Really now, how hard do you think it was to find out what they were looking for?"  
The woman frowned. "Well, whatever it is, if it keeps the dragons away from here, I can only hope it eludes Lord Greken forever."  
"It's a young man, if you would believe it. Some human thief who stole a jewel or something. So much trouble, is it not?"  
Her frown deepened. "The affairs of Lord Greken do not concern us."  
The old man snorted again. "The affairs of Lord Greken consistently bring huge serpents and demon soldiers to our doorstep. Frankly, I'm concerned."  
He turned back to the sky. "Vargus is the one that confirms important matters and brings important news to Greken. If the dragons had found their prey, he would make every effort to help them apprehend it rather than updating his master. And he doesn't bother with mundane news such as invading armies or local matters."  
"I'm going inside," the man's daughter said in a huff. "If you'd rather stay out here and tempt the lizards to make a snack of you, then go ahead."  
­­­

"Vargus? Back so soon from the Southlands?" The massive grend didn't face his servant, but instead perused the various books in his library, almost seeming to ignore the figure kneeling behind him. "It would be wishful thinking for me to hope you bring good news, wouldn't it?"  
"It is as you say, my lord."  
Kneeling behind the table in Dashtall's library was a tall, thin, broad-shouldered man with long, oily black hair. "I admit I am not sure exactly what has occurred. But Leia is missing and we have been unable to find or contact her."  
Dashtall selected a book and calmly pulled the tome out, its relatively large bulk fitting in the palm of his scaly hand as if it were a pad of sticky notes. "Where was she last seen?"  
"In North Korea, searching the necrotic wasteland that Yaermon built there during the war," the venom dragon answered neutrally. "Garmis was the last one to have seen her. He notes that when she departed him, she was bragging that she would be the one to slay the thief you seek and bring his head to you."  
"Just as likely an idle boast as a deserved one," the grend lord mumbled aloud.  
"Garmis was leaning toward idle boast himself. He always did hold the magic-users in unfortunate contempt, and is quick to dismiss them as arrogant fools," Vargus explained, sparing no detail in his report. The reputations of his fellow dragons were nothing to him.  
"He may have a point," Dashtall said, placing his book on the desk that sat between him and his draconian servant. "If it was not an idle boast, then I doubt Leia would have told anyone else for the sake of caution or assuring success in the mission."  
"You are correct. I am of the opinion that she would take measures to ensure she alone knew of the prey's whereabouts, and then seek to complete the mission herself." Vargus looked up cautiously. "The fact that she has fallen out of contact supports the hypothesis that she did in fact have some sort of lead on the prey's location. Meaning either she's still in pursuit and neglecting her duties to ensure she makes the kill." The venom dragon's expression became even more guarded. "Or..."  
"Or?" the demon lord asked, one eyebrow raised.  
"... Or she was defeated, and perhaps killed," Vargus finally said somewhat apprehensively.  
Like all dragons, Vargus had a penchant for vanity, as well as a strong, yet easily shakable confidence that came with being one of the most supremely powerful beings born in nature. Dragons thrived on personal power and decadence, and the thought of being sent out piecemeal on a task that could leave one dead through unknown circumstances earnestly frightened the beasts. It was one of the reasons they made poor servants and soldiers in the first place, and Dashtall was well aware of the limitation.  
"If she has fallen, it was not by the creature you hunt," the grend said dismissively. "Leia had a penchant for showmanship and mass slaughter. It is entirely possible she attracted the notice of the Israeli expeditionary forces. They've been scouting nearby, and she wouldn't last long against them."  
Vargus looked even more alarmed at this, and jumped to his feet. "I-If the IEF is in the area, then the others must be warned! Or... Or, we should take to traveling in twos and threes, for safety! We should-"  
"You should silence yourself!" Dashtall hissed, barely suppressing a grin as the venom dragon immediately fell to one knee once more. "I refuse to be the master of idiots and weaklings! If your kind cannot manage to complete such a simple hunt on its own without attracting the attention of an entire army, I would rather be rid of the lot of you!" The grend lord glared down at the cowering dragon. "You will tell no one else of Leia's disappearance. And you will arrange communications such that she is not missed. In the meantime, **I WANT THAT MAN DEAD**."  
"It w-will be done, my lord!"  
­­­

"Stupid scaly freaks," Ranma muttered as he crouched low in the brush, employing his Ninja aura cloaking technique while peering at the huge red shape in the sky through his binoculars.  
Ahem! K, who was nestled just under Ranma on the ground, so as to be masked by the "non-aura" that Ranma generated, cleared his throat meaningfully.  
The pigtailed man sighed. "Look, by all indications we're going to be running into a lot of dragons on our way up to see this demon lord, so from now on, whenever I make a dragon-related slur, the 'present company excluded' is implied, all right?"  
"Would it kill you to just be a little more polite?" the metadragon complained, casting his own eyes warily on the fire dragon circling above.  
"No," Ranma admitted, "but I feel that the sheer volume of other things I have to worry about killing me more than justifies hateful, angry words." Then he turned around, still in a crouch. "And what the HELL do you think YOU'RE doing!"  
Gzak! Tzrrt! Arcs of black lightning crackled around Rayden's hands as he held a sphere of dark energy between his palms, held to his side in the classic hadoken "charge gathering" pose.  
"It's called a _rune beam_," Rayden explained, "it's a basic, but very powerful spell the Brotherhood teaches. You see, it-"  
"I'm less interested in knowing the particulars of your spells and way MORE interested in knowing why you look like you're gonna use them when we're supposed to be keeping a low profile," Ranma interrupted. "'Low profile' as in: hide and don't attack."  
Rayden frowned, still holding the charge of deadly energies. "That sounds like a bad plan to me."  
"Why?"  
"Because it doesn't involve me killing, or that dragon dying," Rayden said with his usual blunt honesty. "I'm pretty sure a good plan would involve at least one of those things, and a GREAT plan would have lots of both."  
Ranma raised an eyebrow. "Okay... tell me, what can that spell you've got cocked there do to a dragon? Damage-wise?"  
Rayden looked thoughtful for a moment, which made him appear especially foolish while still in his energy-charging pose. "It would probably sear off a huge patch of scales, or tear a chunk of flesh out of the impact point. In addition to causing intense, mind-numbing pain, of course."  
"In short, enough damage to send the dragon after us in a berserker fury, but not enough damage to actually hinder it in any way," K summarized.  
"Are you going somewhere with this, tinhead?" The dark paladin said, annoyed.  
"Whatever. Don't fire," Ranma commanded, turning away as the larger man began to sulk.

Watching overhead once more, Ranma frowned as the dragon landed on a distant hill, and began searching in their general direction.  
"Dammit Rayden, get down!" Ranma shouted, turning once more.  
Once he had turned around, and actually saw his companion's state, Ranma's left eye twitched. Rayden was still in the same pose as before, with the same sphere of unholy power hovering between his palms. "Look, I said you can't fire it! Just forget it!"  
"I heard you! I'm not gonna fire it!" Rayden insisted irritably, a bit of sweat dripping down his forehead.  
"Well, then why are you still charging it!" Ranma hissed. "You have to be bleeding mana like crazy right now! You're going to give away our position! Hurry up and disperse it!"  
Many more beads of sweat joined the first few. "Yeah, about that... not happening." At Ranma's angry glare, he felt obligated to explain himself. "Well, uh... there are only two ways I can... um... 'disperse' this charge here. One being actually shooting the beam."  
"Would the other one blow us up or give away our position faster than you're doing now?"  
Rayden sweated a lot more. "It wouldn't give us away, no. And it wouldn't blow **us** up, but-"  
"Then hurry up and do it!" Ranma shouted, "I think he's coming this way!"

Rayden squinted his eyes at the dark red shape in the distance, and grimaced as he realized the dragon was, in fact, taking flight in their direction. Which didn't bother him, but did seem to be distressing Ranma greatly, and as he was the leader, such a thing simply wouldn't do.  
'Well, here goes. I sure hope this doesn't kill me. I don't think my bloodthirsty warrior cult would forgive me if I died because I was trying to avoid a fight.' Shuddering at the blasphemous thought, Rayden steeled himself.  
And then he smashed his palms together, forcing the dark, arcane energies back into the darkness-spawned vessel from whence they came.

Ranma watched curiously as Rayden finally dispersed the beam, and then watched in morbid fascination as the demonic swordsman's entire body was suddenly swathed in pure black, as if the very shadows beneath them had gotten up and wrapped themselves around the man.  
Foosh! Ranma's nose twitched as the smell of burned flesh filled the air, and he winced as Rayden fell over forward, clearly unconscious.  
"Ouchies. I do believe we just witnessed two liters of whupass being crammed back into its half-liter can," K said sympathetically.  
Ranma frowned. "Uh... what just happened, exactly? I mean, your analogy was helpful, but I don't understand what I just saw here."  
K nodded in understanding. "Yes, I would expect that someone who isn't versed in magic use wouldn't really know the specifics..." the metadragon stepped forward and then turned around to face Ranma. "You see, once a spell has been cast but not released, you can't just STOP it. In the case of normal spellcasting from mages, a request to 'cancel' a spell in the aiming stage would probably result in a miscasting, the results of which could be anywhere from annoying to hideously fatal."  
"Less background, more foreground," Ranma demanded, glancing up through the brush. "Mr. Fire Breather is still coming, you know."  
"Well, of course. Rayden is bleeding just as much dark mana as before, if not more. Well, and he's literally bleeding now too, but that really isn't relevant to this explanation." Despite all manner of impossibilities, K pointed toward a chart propped up on the ground next to him. The chart showed an outline of Rayden, with little arrows flowing out of him that were labeled as being "dark mana".  
"Now you see, our Dread Knight companion, like all creatures in nature, is an energy generator. As a demonic being, his energies resonate with mana flows, and he also generates dark mana. As there is an upper limit to how much even his enhanced body can safely contain, the excess power is constantly flowing out of him, which manifests into an aura."  
Ranma sweatdropped as K flipped over the first sheet and moved on to the next chart. This one had a black circle next to the same Rayden outline as before, with even more arrows pointing from Rayden into the circle, and a few pointing from the sky down toward the circle as well.  
"As Rayden uses clerical magic like all paladins and priests, he funnels energy into a sort of spell 'structure', while his patron God funnels energy into the pattern, turning raw mana into pure death."  
Two more sweatdrops joined the first one as the lecture continued, this time with a new chart that showed the Rayden outline with many large arrows curving all around and pointing toward it, along with a large caption that said "no way".  
"Trying to put this energy BACK into the vessel that summoned it is stupid. Even if it weren't for the fact that mana is extremely unstable in a coherent, physical state, ESPECIALLY destructive shadow magic, the summoning body simply cannot absorb that much power all at once."  
Ranma twitched as K finished his lengthy explanation. "Then why didn't you say anything when I told him to do that?"  
"I wanted to see what would happen. Though I have to say the visual effects aren't at all as spectacular as I'd hoped."  
"You're an evil little dragon," the pigtailed wanderer said. "Speaking of which, the evil big dragon's almost here."  
That said, Ranma snatched K up in his arms and dove into the underbrush, concealing himself and his draconic friend completely as a large shadow eclipsed the sun.

Thoom! The fire dragon landed heavily on the ground on all fours, readying itself for any opposition as its long neck whipped about to search for foes.  
Once it was convinced that there was nobody else around, the dragon lowered its head to the smoldering mess lying on the ground below it.  
Rayden remained unconscious as the dragon sniffed at him, a dark haze of destructive energy still clinging to his body and clothing and giving him the appearance of a large black splotch on the ground (though it would be hard not to notice that all the grass and bushes surrounding the splotch had begun to wither and die in an ever-increasing radius around it).

"Cripes! What am I gonna do?" Ranma whispered as he peeked out of the brush.  
"Who says you have to do anything?" K said nonchalantly. "He knew the risks when he signed up. He assured us that he could handle himself if besieged by monstrous creatures of unkind intent. And he screwed up and got himself into this situation. Isn't this sort of thing the reason why you didn't want him around in the first place?"  
"Yeah, but now that he's officially in, I feel responsible for the dope. You wouldn't happen to know of any fire dragon weak spots, would you?"  
K raised an eyebrow. "Try destroying the heart or head. Those are pretty valuable organs." He looked up and noted that Ranma was glaring at him. "What! He's a dragon! He doesn't have 'weak spots'!"  
"Keep it down, idiot!" Ranma hissed, watching as the fire dragon hunched over Ranma's body. "Well, maybe if he keeps playing dead, he'll-"  
Chomp! Crunch! Snap!  
Ranma's face paled. "Oh dear..."  
"Ewww..." K gagged as he watched the larger dragon chew. "Raw human? Well, half-human anyway. Though I can't imagine dark mana makes for a good aftertaste."

Indeed, to the spectators' surprise, the dragon seemed to be having difficulty chewing the mass it had snatched up, and K was able to recognize a scaly grimace on the beast's face, which was most likely due to the unpleasant flavor of its meal.  
Pleagh! Thud! Rayden hit the ground with a soft, wet impact as his blood mixed freely with the highly toxic dragon saliva, creating a pool of bright red laced with oily yellow slime that crept out from under him.  
The dragon, after spitting a few times to get the taste out of its mouth, and silently wondering how anything that size could be so tough and hard to chew, jumped up into the air and flapped its mighty wings, quickly gaining altitude and soaring away.

Ranma slowly crept out of the bushes as the malicious beast flew off, and then quickly crossed the distance between him and his fallen companion.  
He didn't make it there before the smell of the fire dragon's mouth fluids assaulted him, and the pigtailed man backpedaled as the strong odor warded him away.  
"Gah! What the hell is that stuff!"  
K grimaced as he covered his nose with his wings. "Dragon saliva can be pretty strong, depending on the species. I'll bet it feels much worse than it smells, though."  
"I think he's still alive! We hafta get that stuff off him!"  
K raised an eyebrow at Ranma. "What makes you say he's still alive?"  
Ranma frowned. "Well... he's too much of a mess for me to tell whether he's breathing or not... without actually touching him, anyway. And, well..." he scratched his head and shrugged. "The guy's been messed up worse than this before, and stayed conscious. I'm pretty sure he survived being chewed on."  
K seemed to accept this. "Well, he won't survive being chewed on for long. If the blood loss doesn't get him, the poisonous fluids will." The metadragon spared a moment to consider the situation, then nodded. "Okay... try launching a small bolt of fire at him."  
Perhaps it was because Ranma was desperate for a solution to save Rayden that didn't involve touching him. Or maybe it was because he didn't see how the application of fire could possibly make the situation worse for the dark paladin. But for whatever reason, the pigtailed warrior didn't even hesitate before he snapped a hand back and summoned a tiny charge of fire ki before flinging it at his fallen companion.  
FA-WOOOSH! A huge blossom of flame burst from Rayden's body as the (apparently) highly combustible saliva ignited, and Ranma stared with wide eyes as the tower of flame slowly shrank before it started to spread across the ground.  
Twitching, Ranma activated his own fire aura, and a red haze enveloped him and kept away the flames that began to crawl through the dead and dying grass. "K, did you know that would happen?"  
"I was pretty sure it would. The flammable chemicals in fire dragon saliva is what makes it so poisonous in the first place. Why?"  
"Because now our companion has gone from being slowly poisoned to death to being quickly burned to death. Not an improvement," Ranma growled through clenched teeth.  
K sweatdropped. "Well... look at it this way; before, it was pretty much a sure thing that he'd die eventually. Now, if he survives the fire, all the poison will be gone, and all his wounds will be cauterized."  
"Leaving only severe burns, exposure, and organ trauma to deal with."  
"Right. Demons shrug that kind of stuff off easy. Sometimes. Maybe."  
Ranma sighed and scrubbed his hair with his hand as he watched the surrounding brush catch aflame. "Whatever. Let's put him out and get outta here. We still have a LONG way to go."  
­­­

K blinked. "I guess we didn't have a long way to go after all. Here we are."  
Ranma sweatdropped as he put down Rayden's body and his backpack. "Well, how was I supposed to know the town was right over the hill that dragon was sitting on? I've never been here before."  
"And on that note," K muttered, "are we sure that's Dalarin? Most human structures aren't built into the hills like that."  
"It's Dalarin, all right," Rayden said somberly, crossing his arms over his chest.  
Ranma shrugged. "Well, if you say sOWAUGH!" Jumping back in surprise, the pigtailed man stared with wide eyes at his demonic companion. K had been just as shocked, and forgotten to take flight as Ranma dashed away.  
Thud! "Ow! Hey, stop it with the sudden movements!"  
"Geez! Are you okay?" Ranma asked doubtfully as he calmed himself, raising an eyebrow at the larger man.  
"Not really, no. But I should be by the time we're done here." Rayden said seriously. Then he frowned and looked down at himself.  
Ranma bigsweated as Rayden inspected his clothes, which were mostly torn up and burnt to charred, cracking sheets of fabric. Surprisingly the trench coat had survived the fire more or less intact, but the article of clothing was no longer remotely fit for wearing.  
Rayden nodded in satisfaction. "I see I somehow suffered puncture wounds while I was out. Did you cauterize them, or did the dragon roast me?"  
More sweat trickled down Ranma's brow. "That, uh... that was me."  
Rayden grinned. "Hey, thanks man! You're all right, you know that?" Giving the smaller man a good-natured slap on the shoulder, the demon hunter stretched and began to walk toward the village.

Ranma wiped the sweat off his brow as his newest companion left. "Well... he seems to be reasonable. For a demonic knight, anyway."  
"Hey, whatever keeps that sword away from our necks," K mumbled. Obviously the metadragon still didn't believe Rayden had their best interests at heart.

Ranma and K quickly caught up with the demon hunter, and listened silently as the dark paladin began to prattle on about the region.  
"Dalarin's people dig their homes into bunkers under the hills here because of all the flying predators around this place. They do the same things with their farms. Though they're on many supply routes, they survive mostly by avoiding attention, as there are no groups of significant power nearby to protect them."  
Ranma nodded idly as he looked around at the steep mounds that dotted the area. All of them had sturdy, camouflaged doors attached, and oddly enough, many of those doors were cracked open, obviously so that the inhabitants could see the new arrivals without exposing themselves to danger.  
Further up ahead, the pigtailed man could see groups of villagers gathering behind a well as they stared at the newcomers fearfully, talking in a panic to an old man.  
"Though naturally cautious due to the poor defenses of their settlement, Dalarin's people are not normally paranoid or overly suspicious," Rayden continued, gesturing with one hand to the surrounding area like a normal tour guide, "which, you may have noticed, seems quite strange given their present behavior."  
"Yeah, I did kinda notice that," Ranma said sarcastically, "you don't think it might have anything to do with you bein' a demon knight, do you?"  
"Don't be ridiculous," Rayden said dismissively, crossing his arms over his chest. "Little backwater townships like this don't interest the Third Brotherhood. I doubt they'd even heard of us. And I look enough like a normal human that they wouldn't recognize me for a dark paladin without recognizing the crest on my coat."  
It was at that point that the old man beside the well slowly scrambled up behind Rayden, and then kneeled shakily, lowering his head. "Oh, mighty though apparently badly singed servant of Kharak, the Destroyer! We beseech you to have mercy on our poor, wasted lands!"  
Beads of sweat poured down Rayden's brow as Ranma and K each raised an eyebrow at him.  
"While I admit this appears to hurt my case, I'm willing to chalk it up to a case of mistaken identity," Rayden said firmly.  
"Oh, but there is no mistake!" The elder said, "After all, you who bear the mark of the Destroyer, the dread crest of the Third Brotherhood of Kharak! ... Though it is slightly difficult to distinguish, being all charred like that."  
More sweat poured down Rayden's head, and Ranma sighed and pushed him out of the way. "Step back before you hurt yourself." Then he focused on the old man. "Hey there! Name's Ranma Saotome! Don't worry about this guy over here, he's not here to slay you all or take your women or anything."  
The old man blinked. "Well, of course not! The Cult of Blood is very specific in its demands for our crops and gold! But I beg of you, leave us be for a season, or I fear we will not be able to survive much longer!"  
"Look grandpa, the big guy may be part of this 'Cult of Blood' thing, but as a group, we're not. We're not here to steal from you, we just want to do some regular trading."  
Hushed and excited whispers erupted from the villagers still hiding behind the well, and many of them quickly left to tell others that their village was in no danger.  
"While we're at it, though," Ranma said, glaring at Rayden, "why don't we have a chat about these supply raids the Brotherhood is making?"  
Rayden sweatdropped and backpedaled. "Whoa, hey! I don't know what that's all about! Don't look at me!"  
The old man frowned at the badly charred dread knight, and then spoke in a low voice to Ranma. "If you trust your companion to stand with you, then we ask of your help, young warrior."  
Ranma grinned. "I'm all about helping. Let's chat."  
­­­

Thoom! Thoom! Thoom! Thoom!  
The loud pounding of heavy talons shook the Earth as three reaper pack beasts clambered down the road, their massive claws digging hideous ruts into the ground as they strode forth.  
Though monstrous, armored behemoths, the creatures were of a relatively docile breed, born and trained only to haul cargo, and protect it if necessary.  
Standing atop the lead reaper was a single figure that stood tall upon its mount, silhoutted against the moonlight.  
"Hmmm... next is Dalarin. Might as well make that the last one for tonight."  
­­­

"She usually comes in the dead of night," the elder explained as Ranma listened intently from across the table. "Not by choice you understand, but because she makes many other 'collections' before she reaches our town."  
"It's a she?" K asked idly, sticking his beak into the cup of tea he had been offered.  
The elder nodded. "Oh, yes. A priestess of the Destroyer, a dark cleric! And a beautiful one, at that."  
K perked up. "Beautiful? Isn't she a demon?"  
"Demon or no, she takes human form. And what a form!" The elder shook his head. "How many of our village men have given more than she demanded share under that haunting gaze? But there's no mistaking her intentions! She takes from us, and threatens our lives should we resist!"  
Ranma nodded slowly. "Let's talk guards... how many?"  
"None," the old man said with a frown. "Though she uses reaper beasts for transportation, she takes no guards. Either she fears no reprisal from the people she victimizes, or she is secure in her own strength."  
"That'd be the latter," Rayden interjected from where he was lounging on a nearby crate and guzzling some brandy. "There's no one in our order who isn't trained to fight, and we aren't really fond of having guards. Shows weakness 'n all."  
Ranma shrugged. "Well, that'll make it easier." Then he turned toward the swordsman. "Ray, you sure you're down with this? We're planning an attack on a member of your cult, you know."  
Rayden shrugged and sat up. "Sure, I'm fine. While bullying innocents into giving tribute without even offering protection in return isn't STRICTLY against our tenets..."  
"Surprise surprise," K muttered.  
"... It's still pretty damn cowardly, and any real dread knight would know that," Rayden finished sourly, chugging down the rest of his alcohol. "Ah! Besides! Killing each other over moral or philosophical disputes isn't against our tenets either!" Ranma sweatdropped at this, and turned away again.  
"Your kindness will not be forgotten, master dread knight!" The elder said, before turning toward Ranma. "Nor yours, master Saotome! We will be more than happy to reward your efforts should you-"  
"Elder! Elder!" A man suddenly burst into the room carrying a flashlight and looking panicked. "She has arrived, as expected! Her convoy will reach the village center in a matter of moments!"  
The elder nodded and turned toward Ranma. "What would you have us do?"  
Ranma grinned and stood up. "I'd have you stay safe. Things are going to get pretty hot out there, so just stay here in your homes and leave this to the professionals."  
­­­

"Come on now! What are you all waiting for! Don't make me come get you!" The woman standing atop the head reaper shouted to the surrounding hills, and homes hidden within them.  
Frowning, the dark priestess pondered this sudden bout of disobedience. She could sense the humans within their homes, so she knew they were here, yet there were no more guards or defenses to stop her than there were the last several times she had arrived. Did they think to hide from her and hope that she thought them gone?  
"Ridiculous. It seems I'll have to make an example." Smirking, the priestess summoned dark mana into her hands, and sculpted a black sphere of energy that hovered between her palms over her chest.  
"And now then... which hovel to destroy..." tapping her lip with one hand while holding her spell in the other, she selected a mound at random, and then brought the mana sphere to bear.  
"_Hatred, rage, greatest pain in heart and soul, let the powers of shadow cleanse this place of life and suffering. Blaze of war! **Blood flare**_!" With the completion of the incantation, the black sphere turned an angry, violent red, and the priestess flung the deadly energy bomb at the chosen abode.  
Whp! Whp! Whp! Whp!  
"Hm?" The demonic priestess glanced to the side as the sound of a heavy object rushing through the air grabbed her attention, and her eyes widened as what appeared to be a thrown great sword sliced right into her spell bolt, tearing easily through the condensed, dark mana without causing the expected detonation. The blood flare fizzled immediately, its energies scattered like the seeds of a dandelion's head.  
Whp! Whp! Whp! The great sword, strangely enough, continued its unreasonably aerodynamic flight as it kept spinning about in the air, and actually curved around to fly back to where it had come from.  
The dark priestess was about the investigate the source of the weapon, when a more obvious threat revealed itself right below her.  
"You won't be blowing up anybody's home today, lady. Give up now, and never return here again. Or die."

The dark priestess's eyes narrowed. A young man stood before her at the base of her reaper mount, staring at her with his arms crossed. He wore simple, unadorned leather armor, and carried a handgun and a katana.  
She smiled. "Hello human! Am I to assume the villagers hired some wandering mercenary hero to defend them? How quaint! It's an honor to indulge such a time-honored tribute to foolish human hope!" Then she stamped on the head of her mount. "Kill him."  
"KREEE-AAAAUGH!" The reaper let out an ear-pounding scream as its gaping mandibles opened and it charged Ranma, its clawed legs pounding the Earth as its gaping beak drew nearer.  
Ranma merely shook his head, and let his ki gather into his left hand. "Well... you were warned. _Dragon fist_!" Rayden and K watched from atop the nearly-destroyed homestead as Ranma drilled his ki-powered attack straight into the reaper's vulnerable mouth, blowing back the entire beast from the force behind the punch, and cooking it from the inside out by aiming the energies right down its gullet.  
Rayden licked his lips as he watched the reaper shudder and then collapse, its legs crumbling inward as they no longer possessed the strength to hold up the main body. "You know, I know a few good recipes for reaper meat. I'll bet I could make some good eats outta that one."  
K blinked. "I thought their meat was tough and stringy?"  
"Just the meat eaters. The pack ones are usually herbivores, and their meat's a lot better."  
"Really? What kind of plants does something that size eat?"

While his companions began discussing the particulars of reaper biology, Ranma crossed his arms over his chest and stared up at the woman atop the dead reaper. "Give up yet?"  
The dark priestess, oddly enough, didn't seem at all disturbed by her mount being killed, and was smiling broadly. "Well, well, we're a powerful little firecracker, aren't we?" Giggling, she jumped off her deceased mount, and landed lightly on the ground, her form now completely illuminated by the flames gathered on the reaper's corpse.  
She was of average height for a woman, with a thin, curvaceous build and an impressive bust, easily a match for his old childhood friend Karen. She had long blue hair that was tied in a straight, smooth ponytail that reached down to her ankles, while the hair atop her head was spiky and mussed. She was wearing what Ranma guessed was a proper priestess outfit only among the dark cults; it was a slinky black dress with spiked shoulder pauldrons and long slits down the sides to show off her legs.  
"My name is Sonia, Dark Priestess of the second rank of the Third Brotherhood of Kharak. And your name, noble warrior?"  
Ranma frowned. "You don't need to know my name. You DO need to know that you're dead if you don't leave. We're serious here."  
"Aw, don't be like that," Sonia said teasingly, wagging a finger at him. "Come now, I'm actually quite fond of humans! And watching you roast that wretched beast was **quite** a turn-on..." she winked at him, and Ranma felt a sweatdrop roll down his head.  
"Hey... whoa. Wait a minute. We're enemies here! What do you think you're doing!" Ranma shouted angrily. "I'm not going to let you get away with victimizing these people!"  
"Oh! Well..." The dark priestess fingered her lip as she looked thoughtful. "We don't really NEED the supplies from this village, you know. I suppose I'd be willing to skip this village... if you do something for me..."  
The pigtailed man's eye twitched. "Look Sonia, I'm just a flick of the wrist away from gutting you like a fish, so shut your trap and surrender!"  
The woman shuddered, though the pleasant expression on her face made it seem that she wasn't feeling fear of any degree. "Ooooh... you like it rough, don't you?" Then she licked her lips, and her eyes started to glow a frosty blue. "Well good... so do I..."  
Then a light blue haze enveloped her form, and the dark priestess sank straight into the ground, phasing straight through the solid matter like a specter would.  
Ranma frowned as he stared at the completely undisturbed patch of ground where his foe used to be. "Huh. Didn't see that comin'."  
"Hup!" Ranma gasped as he felt himself suddenly snatched from behind, and found himself being dragged upward into the air while being grasped by powerful feminine arms.  
"Oh, struggle, please!" Sonia whispered into his ear. "It makes the eventual domination THAT much more satisfying!"  
Ranma grimaced as he looked down. "I don't suppose you'd be interested in telling me what the hell you are, would you?" 'Dang, I'm a long ways up...'  
Sonia giggled. "It's more fun if you try and figure it out!"  
And then it was the cleric's turn to be surprised as Ranma wrapped his legs around her waist and slipped easily out from under her grip, before flipping under her legs and ending up sitting atop her back.  
"Pretty weak hold you have there, lady! Especially with those bazongas in the way! Don't look down, now!" With the final taunt he focused his ki into his legs, and then kicked the woman downward viciously, causing a powerful shock wave to burst out from the initial air pressure.  
As Ranma fell himself, he frowned as he watched the clearly flight-capable priestess zip straight toward the ground at terminal velocity; and then grimaced as she went straight through the ground once more, leaving no disturbance upon the Earth to indicate it might have harmed her.  
Thud! "Damn, that trick's getting old real fast!" Ranma cursed as he landed himself on one of the hills that made up the homes of the area.  
A brief, muffled scream of terror from within the home below was all the warning he had, and the pigtailed warrior rolled to the side as Sonia phased up from the ground once more, her arms crossed over her chest.  
The dark priestess pouted. "What's wrong with my breasts? I happen to be very proud of them!" She whined, squeezing one of them for emphasis. It was all Ranma could do not to facefault.  
"N-Nothing! Nothing's wrong with them! They're really very-" the pigtailed man suddenly shook his head violently. "Damn it, would you start acting like this is a fight! Your life is at stake here!"  
The dark priestess grinned again, though Ranma noted she didn't stop playing with her left bosom. "Oh, please. You call this a fight? This is just foreplay."  
Ranma's eyes narrowed, and he drew his nighthawk, aiming it with one hand while keeping his other ready to defend. "How's this for foreplay?"  
"Ooh, very nice!" Sonia squealed. "Now let me see your other gun!"  
Crash! Ranma couldn't help it this time, and facefaulted powerfully. "Why... won't... you... fight me... seriously?"  
Sonia shrugged. "I don't feel like it. And you haven't even drawn that magic sword of yours, so you can't be ALL that serious about 'gutting me like a fish'."  
Ranma jumped up. "I can't kill a woman who's barely defending herself!"  
"Oh dear, what a mess, then!" The demonic priestess said in mock worry. "I suppose it can't be helped. Would you like to find a vacant space somewhere and make out?"  
The pigtailed man's face darkened. "And WHY is it you don't feel like fighting, exactly? You DO worship the God of War and Destruction, right?"  
"So? There's no rule that says I can't destroy the ugly and weak and play with the handsome and strong. Whaddya say, beefcake?"  
Ranma twitched. "I say you can take your cowardly little self-serving ways and shove them up your-"  
"_Dark crash_!" S-KRRACK! "SHRRRREEEEEAAUGH!

Both combatants jerked to attention as a dim flare of light burst from the town square below, and Sonia floated up in the air to get a better view as she heard the death cry of one of her pack reapers. "What's going on! What was that!"  
Ranma smirked. "THAT, Miss Evil Cleric Lady, was what someone **properly** devoted to the idea of pointless slaughter and unnecessary violence sounds like." Then he walked up to the edge of the hill that best overlook the scattering reapers below. "Hey, Rayden! You were supposed to wait for the signal!"  
Down below, a barely illuminated dark shape waved back to him. "I know! But do you have any idea how boring it is talking to K?"  
"All is forgiven!" Ranma said immediately.  
"Hey!" An irritated metadragon shouted from above the carnage, only to be ignored by all.  
'Rayden? Does he mean...? Is that...?' Sonia swallowed nervously as she summoned several motes of light to illuminate the scene below.

"_Dark crash_!" Rayden shouted again, his great sword trailing arcane power as it cleaved viciously into the next pack reaper.  
"SHEEEEEEEEAAAAAH!" The beast screamed as its thick, armored carapace was ripped apart from the blow, the blade itself tearing through its main body before the dark energies powering the attack detonated, shredding the creature into bloody chunks.  
Rayden grinned and swung his sword upward to rest it on his shoulder as the final pack reaper turned to face him, gibbering in its own visceral way.  
As the remains of his last victim still burned with black fire, Rayden took up a new stance against the final beast, with his sword arm and the shoulder it was resting on facing the live reaper, and his free hand behind him, collecting more dark energies.  
"Wait! Stop this! Please!" A feminine voice cried out above him.  
"Hmmm... stop this... or kill something..." Rayden mumbled to himself, not bothering to look at the source of the voice. "Well, that's hardly a choice at all. _Shadow break_!"  
SKA-BOOM! The last reaper didn't get a chance to scream as its beak and head were completely pulverized by the force behind Rayden's force punch, splintering inward toward its vital organs even before the energies detonated, which further obliterated the beast's head, and sent its corpse skidding a good twelve meters across the square as supplies and valuables fell off of its broken pack saddle.  
"OH yeah. That felt good after getting toasted and bitten." Rayden grinned and sheathed his sword, then leaned over to dust the splattered blood and bits of carapace off his new trench coat.

"It IS him," Sonia mumbled. "But... but why-AH!" She shouted in surprise as Ranma suddenly grabbed her in a hold from behind, effectively binding one of her arms and then holding a dagger close to her throat.  
"All right lady, it's over. You didn't wanna fight, and now all your haulers are dead. Now you're our prisoner, got it?"  
Ranma expected her to laugh, or snap at him, or maybe make another suggestive remark. To his surprise, however, the dark priestess nodded silently, and stood up straight, trying to look dignified.  
"Hey Rayden, over here! I caught her!"  
K perched himself upon Rayden's head as the dark paladin approached the prisoner, finally coming close enough to see her clearly in the moonlight.  
"Dang! She fine!" K crowed, flapping his wings.  
Rayden frowned, then raised an eyebrow. Then he scratched his chin thoughtfully.  
Sonia sweatdropped. "Don't recognize me, Shikodan?"  
Suddenly, the dread knight brightened. "SONIA! Sonia Yaermon! It's you! By the Eye, it's really you!"  
Rayden rushed up the side of the mound and slapped her hard on the shoulder, which caused her to wince. "Man, I haven't seen you since my induction ceremony! How ya been, you old witch?"  
"Old witch?" Ranma wondered aloud, eyeing the woman warily. "Okay, I can't say I'm surprised you two know each other... does this mean it's okay for me to let her go?"  
Rayden shrugged. "Not really, no. But it's probably a good idea to let her go anyway before she electrocutes you."  
Ranma blinked. "Electrocutes?"  
"Yeah. She's a psilor, dude. Strong one, too."  
"GYAH!" Ranma quickly jumped back from his prisoner while quickly kicking her in a vital point and slamming her into the ground mostly on reflex.  
Apparently this surprised the dark priestess, as she failed to phase into the ground and avoid harm as she had done before. "Ow! What are you doing! I said I surrender!"  
"Surrender? Already? Hmph. What are you doing out here, anyway?" Rayden asked, looking at his companion cultist suspiciously.  
"I **was** gathering supplies for use in the nearby temple base Lord Sachrim is constructing," Sonia explained. "We number only a small band of Kharak's chosen, with few Dread Knights and even fewer priests. The majority are acolytes and workers. We cannot wage any campaign against the rich territories nearby that would not cost more than we could possibly gain. And these small territories are weak and barely armed, such that even the acolytes would not lower themselves to attack them."  
"So instead you bully them into giving you supplies and money. How noble," Ranma spat, his arms crossed over his chest.  
Sonia frowned. "And just who are you, human, that you think to judge us?"  
Ranma jabbed a thumb at himself. "Name's Ranma Saotome, lady. And whether or not you want to listen to me, you can't ignore Ray here."  
Rayden nodded. "He's right. If you need supplies and funds so badly, then get them properly, through mercenary work, or raiding castles! Extortion is for thieves and royalty!"  
Sonia stared at Rayden, then glanced at Ranma. Then she stared at Ranma again. "Wait a minute! Why are you taking orders from HIM!"  
"I don't take orders from anybody!" Rayden said indignantly.  
Thwap! K smacked the dark paladin on the side of the head with a metal wing. "Yes you do!"  
"Oh. Right. I do take orders from him. I forgot." Rayden scratched his head.  
"Why!"  
Ranma zipped over next to Rayden and whispered in the taller man's ear.  
Ahem! "I have been advised that you do not need to know that," Rayden said seriously, "and that instead, we should get about to deciding on your punishment."  
Ranma ignored the glare Sonia was giving him as he continued. "However, first we have to inform the villagers that we've smoothed things over with the dark priestess. It's going to take some time to convince them that she won't kill them or nothing." Then he frowned. "THEN it's going to take more time to convince them not to kill her."  
Sonia was about to interject her own opinion, when Rayden beat her to it. "I have a better idea." Then he clasped the dark priestess on the shoulder, and smiled softly at her. "Sonia?"  
The psilor looked startled by the almost affectionate gaze, and met Rayden's eyes nervously. "Uh... wh-what is it?"  
"_Shadow break_!"

Ranma and K squeezed their eyes shut as Sonia went flying through the air, and winced at the following explosion of rock and debris when she hit the side of another homestead with roughly the same amount of force used to propel satellites into space.  
Ranma sighed and scrubbed his head with his hand. "And HOW was that more elegant or convenient than my solution?"  
Rayden took a moment to clear his throat, then cupped his hands around his mouth. "Hey, helpless villagers! We defeated the evil priestess for ya!"  
"The Gods be praised!"  
"Finally! Peace and freedom!"  
"Ah! I knew ya could do it!"  
Ranma and K sweatdropped as people started to pour out of their homes with flashlights and torches, cheering and praising them once they got a good look at the gaping crater in the side of one of the hills.  
K shrugged. "Score one for violence and deceit, I guess."  
Ranma twitched. "I don't know whether to feel bad because I let him do that, or to feel bad because I didn't do it to her first when we were actually fighting."

"Oh, great saviors, we ask that you stay and feast with us as thanks!" The elder of the village said, raising his cane toward Ranma.  
Rayden was about to say something, when Ranma slapped a hand over his mouth. "Yes, yes, you're all very welcome, but we're very busy saviors and will have to take our thanks to go. Places to go, evils to conquer, all that good stuff, ya'hear?"  
"Huh? Buh' why?" Rayden mumbled past Ranma's hand.  
Ranma grabbed him by the collar and yanked him down so that he could whisper directly into the demonic knight's ear. "BECAUSE, numbskull, when she wakes up she's going to be really pissed off! And if she regains consciousness and kills someone, it's going to look very, VERY bad!"  
Rayden frowned. "... But that's only a problem if she wakes up, right?"  
Not liking where that line of thought was going, Ranma shoved Rayden back upright. "Just get your stuff together and pick her up. Looks like we're camping out tonight."  
­­­

Sonia awoke with a start and bolted upright, her consciousness returning to her like air being suddenly forced into an unpressurized bubble. While she was all too familiar with the sensation, as her expansive consciousness and metaphysical being caused the same effect every time she awoke, it was still painful, inconvenient, and most importantly, it left her completely vulnerable.  
"Hmph. 'Bout time you woke up. Everybody else is already asleep."  
Sonia held her head groggily as she struggled to sort out all her senses and reinstate simple vision. "Ra-Rayden? Is that you?"  
Rayden took a swig of his ever-present booze and shook his head. "Look at you. Can't even take a hit anymore. What have they been teaching you down in the temple pits?"  
The dark priestess looked around in a daze, then frowned. "Where's the other one? That kid? And your pet dragon?"  
Rayden snorted. "They're back at the camp site. They didn't want to be around you when you woke up." He took another swig of alcohol. Gulp! "And just for the record, the dragon is Ranma's pet, not mine."  
"Good. If they're not here, then we can talk alone," the psilor said seriously, her eyes narrowing.  
Rayden blinked. "This isn't about punching you in the face, is it? 'Cause I'm not apologizing for that. It was the best solution to the problem."  
"As much as I would LOVE to have an apology for that, I neither need nor expect one from you. This is about that human! Who is he!" The dark priestess said through clenched teeth.  
"What, he didn't tell you?" The dread knight asked suspiciously. "He's Ranma Saotome."  
"I know his name, you dolt!" Sonia hissed. "But who IS he!"  
Rayden blinked once again. "Uh... I think he's a Ninja. Was that what you were looking for?"  
Sonia slapped her forehead. "Why are you following around a Ninja and doing what he says! You're a dread knight! Bearer of Darkrune! You slaughter humans of that caliber and feed their blood to your blade for breakfast! You can't allow yourself to be led around by some child swordsman!"  
"Bah! You don't know nothin'!" Rayden said angrily, taking a long sip from his booze canteen. "That kid beat me twice in one-on-one combat, and nearly wasted a snow dragon by himself! I'd take him over you as a travelin' partner!"  
Sonia jerked back, looking stricken. "Me! Why? Why would you rather travel with that boy than a member of your order!"  
"Hey, don't knock the kid; he's pretty cool," Rayden said, his speech starting to slur slightly. "And I didn't say 'a member of my order', I said YOU! What's wrong with you! Extorting defenseless villages, and then getting in fights and surrendering? What happened to victory or death?"  
"You said the human defeated you twice, and you're still alive," Sonia deadpanned.  
Rayden shrugged. "That was his choice. He coulda finished me off. But you know how humans are. They have weak stomachs and know mercy and all that." Then he poked her meaningfully in the chest. "'Sides, don't change the subject! You know I'm on a mission, here! And if I stick with Saotome and help him out, he might be able to help me!"  
The dark priestess pushed Rayden's hand away, mostly ignoring the fact that he had poked her in the breast. Had it been anyone else she would have felt either violated or aroused by the gesture, but the dark paladin looming over her had all the sex drive of a hunk of cheese, and she dismissed his indiscretion.  
"It disgraces us all that you should... kowtow to this human! Come back to the temple with me! We can find you a suitable companion, or a company!"  
Rayden snorted. "Forget it Sonia. I'm not returning to the Brotherhood until I've unsealed Darkrune. I've made that clear. I'll stick with the kid."  
The demonic knight was about to chug down the last of his drink, when Sonia slapped it away. "Damn it, Shikodan! Our Brotherhood is shattered! Our companions, teachers, and students, are all scattered across the realms, broken! Our order is on the brink of extinction! And YOU, our final hope for the preservation of our faith, wish to cavort around the countryside with some human fool on a whim!" The psilor's voice had reached a hysterical shout by the end of her lecture, and Rayden sweatdropped.  
"... Geez, don't get all drama queen-y on me," the dark paladin muttered irritably, planting his hands on his knees. "I mean, 'final hope'? Me? Don't you think that was a little far fetched in the first place?"  
"That was exactly what the high bishop thought," Sonia said bitterly. "Those with more faith in our Lord and Master hold hope that He can forge a proper champion out of you."  
Rayden snorted again. "I'm sick of listening to your whining. Get out of here. And don't let me catch you extorting supplies from villages again."  
Sonia glared fiercely at the dark paladin as he began to walk away. "You think you're above your duties! You think you can abandon us!"  
"I can do whatever I want!" Rayden shouted back as he left. "I'm a fallen avatar! A failed vessel! I have no more responsibility than an exile! So stay out of my way and out of my business!"

Angrily stalking back to the dimly burning fire Ranma had made, Rayden took the heavy blade off of his back and slammed it on the ground at the base of the flames.  
Ranma peeked open an eye. "Didn't go well?"  
The demonic knight frowned. "Well... she's not angry about being knocked out, and she won't be bothering townsfolk anymore, if that's what you mean."  
Ranma shrugged and rolled over, curled up under his blanket. "I heard some of the shouting. Bunch of stuff about your mission and the Brotherhood being in trouble, right?"  
"Yeah. It's one of those complicated omni-religious conflicts."  
"Sounds rough," Ranma mumbled, yawning. "Anyway, we'll reach Taer'Kul tomorrow, so... uh... whatever it is that you do at night while not sleeping, make sure you do it. 'Night."  
Rayden sweatdropped as Ranma immediately dropped his head back, dead asleep. "Huh... maybe I'll go take a walk..."  
­­­

"Sssha! Human! Wake yourself!"  
Ranma groaned as the loud noise and a jab to the shoulder disturbed his rest, and rolled over while keeping his eyes squeezed shut. "Geez... 'human' this, and 'human' that... I hava name, y'know..."  
The grend poking at the barely-conscious Ninja hissed and jabbed him again with the barrel of his rifle. "Get up, or your life is forfeit, fool! There's a sizable bounty on your head, and it'sss not particular about what other parts are still attached!"  
Ranma grimaced and sat up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes as he assessed the situation.  
'Two guys above me... one rifle, one axe. Axe man has K. More axes around the camp. How many... six. Plus three holding farther away with big cloaks on; probably gunners.' "All right, all right. I'm up."  
The pigtailed man stared down the barrel of the rifle, then frowned at the reptilian demon holding it. "What the hell is wrong with you?"  
The grends all looked startled at this statement, and Ranma continued.  
"I mean, have I not killed enough of you morons already? Is that it? Why didn't you attack while I was still asleep? At least you would have had SOME chance then. Now I'm not even going to get enough practice to skip morning workout. Jerks."  
Blam! Without even wasting more time on taunts, the grend holding the rifle pulled the trigger, only to find that at some point Ranma had grabbed the barrel of the weapon and pulled it back past his head.  
Whock! Ranma twisted his wrist slightly as he shoved the gun stock into the grend's throat, and then easily swept behind the creature as it stooped over, stunned from the blow to its windpipe.  
Shling! Shwick! Skrak!  
The other hunters looked on in shock as their leader was sliced open before their eyes, his assailant bearing small knives from nowhere and drawing each across, or stabbing it into, a vital spot with graceful, lazy movements that none of the demons could hope to track properly.

Whump! The grend leader hit the ground a bloody mess, and Ranma stepped back so that the rapidly expanding pool of crimson wouldn't get on his boots.  
"Okay, so how're we gonna do this?" The wanderer said sleepily, grasping the bloodied daggers fanned out between his fingers. "One at a time, bum rush, or are you gonna let the gunners try and get me first?"  
"Slishna karrr roocha!" One of the axe-wielding demons shouted in a rage, suddenly taking off toward Ranma in a mad sprint as all the other skirmishers, except the nearest one holding K, joined in the charge.  
Ranma let the knives fall to the ground. "Bum rush! Excellent choice!" Then he placed his gauntleted hand on the hilt of his katana, slowly identifying when each grend had reached a precise point in his attack path. Once each one had, he closed his grip. "_Silver blitzkrieg_!"

The grend that held K clasped tightly in one claw gaped in shock as he saw his companions ripped apart, though to his eyes Ranma's attack consisted of a comet zig-zagging wildly between the assault lines of his companions, followed by vicious silver flashes that themselves preluded great washes of blood.  
In a mere four seconds, Ranma skidded to a stop past the last opponent, and calmly sheathed his blade as the bodies behind him fell to the ground with a series of wet impacts.  
Inwardly, he was grinning like a madman. 'Dang, no normal sword could have survived that kind of abuse! Looks like the old Master was good for more than weird-ass metaphors.'  
"Oh-kay! Next up: You, or the gunners?" Ranma asked the grend holding K hostage, who backed away fearfully at the attention.  
The sound of rustling cloth behind him answered Ranma's question, and he turned his head as three minigun barrels emerged from under the cloaks.  
He sweatdropped. "Miniguns? Dang, just how much IS my bounty?"  
The grend, predictably, didn't deign to answer, and Ranma scrambled away as his position was torn apart by super-high volume gunfire, throwing up as much dirt and debris as would explosive cannons from the sheer volume of ammunition fired.  
Ranma threw himself behind a convenient boulder, and grimaced as he felt his cover shake from the onslaught of lead. 'Wasn't expecting high-quality weapons from these twits. This might be tricky...' While he was more than capable of dodging gunfire from small arms and even the older heavy machine guns, weapons like miniguns and chainguns fired such ridiculous volumes of ammunition that the best his superior dexterity could offer him was a good head-start on running away.  
Calming himself as the gunfire began to wane (some of the guns had jammed or required reloading, no doubt) he stretched out his ki senses to see where the demon holding K had moved to.  
To his surprise, he picked up something else far more easily, and smirked as he continued to search for K. "'Bout time he came in handy!"

BRAA-AA-AA-AAP! Smoke started to pour from the engine of the minigun as its wielder continued to strafe the rock outcropping where their prey had gone into hiding, the powerful but poorly maintained weapon overheating as the grend firing it bought time for his companions to reload.  
One of them finished doing so, and swung his minigun back toward the target's cover, barrels already spinning.  
As the first demon gunner finally let go of the trigger so that his weapon could cool and reload, he sensed something else amiss about the situation. Subtle changes to senses that were common in all demons, but still dull and feeble to the grend race, alerted him to a shifting of the mana flows nearby, and the beast turned away from his weapon to look behind him.  
GS-ZHACK! The other gunners stopped firing in shock as they saw their companion's head explode in a haze of shadow energy and black lightning, and they stared through smoky goggles as the reptilian corpse suddenly crumpled forward, still attached as it was to the weight of its gun.  
Rayden grinned as the other two turned toward him. "Well well, look who's been causing trouble the moment I turn my back! I knew I made the right choice following this kid! _Void bullet_!" He released two more fireballs in the general direction of the remaining two gunners, and one of the demons was swept away in the detonation as the other dodged to the side, swinging his gun around to bear.  
"YO-SHA NIRL!" BRAA-AA-AA-AAP!  
The dark paladin grunted as his body was pounded with an almost continuous beam of lead, and Rayden braced his arms in front of his face in an effort to keep his more sensitive spots from being torn apart.  
Kchng! The minigun suddenly shook in the grend's hands as it's ammunition feed jammed, and the reptilian demon snarled as it started beating at the weapon furiously.  
Rayden shook his head to clear it, more impressed than usual by the power of human weaponry.  
"Endgame, scaly!" He shouted as he charged, calling energy into his fist. "_Shadow break_!"

Ranma cracked his knuckles as he approached the remaining grend, who in turn held up K under his axe threateningly as it backed away.  
"S-Stay right there, human! I can ssstill get a reward for the dragon! If you take another step, I'll kill it here and now!" Inwardly, the grend was praying to its own multitude of Gods that this tactic worked as well on humans as it was rumored to. Having grown up in demonic and draconic civilizations all his life, he had never heard of taking hostages successfully preventing the death of the hostage taker.  
Ranma did stop, and then frowned.  
"Don't listen to this punk!" K crowed angrily, squirming in the demon's mighty claws. "Do your Ninja thing, Ranma! You'll cut him open before he's even realized you moved!"  
Ranma raised an eyebrow at this. 'Before he even realizes I moved, huh... okay...' Figuring out an approach in his head, he started with his usual showdown tactic: irritating banter.  
"So, wait, level with me here. K is COMPLETELY covered by super-hard metal scales. Could you even kill him with that axe in the time it takes me to walk up and cut your head off?"  
The grend sweatdropped. "I, uh... I don't..." then he snarled. "I'm sure you don't want to find out! Ssso don't move a muscle!"  
Ranma smirked. "Nah. Now you've piqued my curiosity."  
K began to bigsweat. "Whoa. Hey. Wait a minute. Let's be cool, here."  
"Uselessss dragon!" The grend roared, choking up on his axe to bring it down through K's neck.  
Shwk! "Grk!"  
K's eyes widened as a katana point burst out of the grend's chest, causing the demon to lurch forward in shock and pain.  
"Bu-But... how?" The reptilian mumbled weakly, as the ki generated image of Ranma that had been standing in front of it suddenly vanished.

Ranma smirked and wrenched his katana free, idly shaking the blood off as the grend's corpse tumbled forward.  
K scrambled free of the dead creature's grasp, and then started scraping the dust off himself with his wings. "I have to admit, I'm torn between the awe of how cool that was, and the anger at you almost getting my head chopped off."  
"I'll take that as a 'thanks for saving me'," Ranma said cockily, sheathing his blade. Then he turned around and cupped his hands around his mouth. "Good timing there, Ray! Thanks for the hand!"  
Rayden, whose left hand still had smoke trailing from it, and whose stomach and chest looked torn and bloody (though Ranma was starting to get used to that look on him), walked up to the campsite looking irritated. "Man, I leave for twenty minutes to go get breakfast, and you get into a fight without me. It's not fair!"  
"Yeah. Fine. Next time we'll tell the assassins to wait for you to get back." Then Ranma planted his fists on his hips. "Speaking of breakfast, where is it?"  
"I dropped it when I heard gunfire. I'll go get it in a sec." Walking up to the campfire, Rayden picked up his sword, which he had left there since the previous night. Then he drew it, and shoved it into the ground. "Be right back." Then the dark paladin turned away to go retrieve the morning meal.

Ranma and K both sweatdropped as they watched the planted greatsword glow a dim blue, and then their faces darkened as they watched the numerous grend corpses tremble, as if in the grasp of some invisible power.  
Splorch! Then they all burst open, blood splashing and oozing out of new cuts and wounds that hadn't been there a moment before.  
"You see? You see what I mean? It's stuff like this. This is exactly what I was afraid of," Ranma said to his dragon, who could only nod mutely as he watched the pooling blood slowly wind its way toward the blade implanted in the ground. "This is the sort of thing that follows a guy around for the rest of his life. From here on out I'll be known as 'one of those guys with the sword that eats the dead' or something."  
"Well, maybe if you keep up the hero act, you can at least be 'one of the benevolent guys with the sword that eats the dead'. Being creepy and morbid doesn't automatically make one evil. And it can be a good selling point for mercenary groups."  
"But I'm NOT creepy or morbid," Ranma groused, watching now as the demonic blade somehow soaked up the blood through its diamond-hard edge.  
K shrugged. "Well... then you may want to look into it. You ARE skilled in an assassin's art."  
Ranma twitched. "Whatever he brought for breakfast better be DAMN good..."  
­­­

Needless to say, neither Ranma nor his steel-clad companion was in the least amused when Rayden trotted back to camp carrying a wet, glistening deathcrawler corpse that had its head smashed in and its abdomen removed.  
"What the hell is this?" Ranma mumbled, gesturing to the dead arachnid. 'Please don't say breakfast, please don't breakfast, please don't say-'  
"Breakfast!" Rayden said happily, lugging his load over to the campfire.  
"Dammit, I knew it," Ranma said miserably, hanging his head. "His entire metabolism is probably some monster nuclear engine that feeds off venom and the souls of orphans or something."  
Rayden sweatdropped as he stoked the fire. "Would you knock it off? I don't feed off souls."  
"You know that deathcrawlers aren't edible by human standards, right?" K said haughtily, flapping his wings. "Their entire bodies are poisonous! I mean, I could eat it without any problems, but even so, it would taste gross! We can't eat poison!"  
"For your information, Mr. Know-It-All," Rayden snapped, standing up and crossing his arms over his chest. "I know exactly what humans can and can't eat. And deathcrawler's bodies aren't entirely poisonous if you remove the venom glands and clean the body properly."  
Ranma grimaced. "That's... great. But still... it's a giant spider."  
Rayden speared the dead monster on his sword, and then held it over the rejuvenated fire. "Yeah? So? I know it's not typically a breakfast food, but I can never pass up deathcrawler." After a moment, he reached into his pocket for some leaves, and then crushed them in his hands.  
K stared as the dread knight began sticking the crushed herbs into the sockets and joints of the roasting corpse. "He's seasoning the spider..."  
"Yes K, I can see that," Ranma groaned, rubbing his forehead with his hand.  
"All done! Man, this stuff cooks fast!" The dark paladin said gleefully, turning around and holding out his sword, arachnid still impaled, to his companions. "Go on, rip off a leg or dig into the thorax!"  
Ranma looked up at the charred, curled-up carapace (though it was difficult to tell, with the shell being solid black to start with). "You're serious, aren't you?"  
"Come on! You gotta at least try it!" Rayden insisted, shaking the sword slightly and making the legs wiggle in such a way that Ranma's stomach churned.  
K backed away. "You first, man. I 'aint touching that."  
The pigtailed man sighed. 'What the hell, I let him tag along with me, didn't I?' With that thought, and a crude grimace, Ranma wrenched off the ends of one of the legs, eyeing the exposed joint socket. Hot steam wafted from the fluffy white meat inside, speckled with dark spots which Ranma guessed to be the spices.  
'Huh... doesn't actually look that bad.' Taking out a bit between his fingers, Ranma quickly popped it into his mouth, fully prepared to engage his gag reflex if necessary.  
"Hmmm... Hummm... Hhhhm!" Gulp!  
Rayden shook his head. "I have to admit, it's not really that good without lemon or butter. And we don't have any of that. But still, I thought it was the best option we had available."  
"Ranma?" K asked worriedly. "You okay, man?"  
Ranma stood up suddenly, his hands shaking. "This... This tastes just like crab! This is great!" With that said, he immediately started chewing apart the spider leg.  
"It tastes like WHAT? Crabs aren't edible..." Rayden murmured, scratching his head as he recalled the gargantuan man-eating beasts of some far-off realm. "What'd you mean by that? Is it no good?"  
Scarf! Chomp! Gulp! Chomp!  
Rayden sweatdropped as it became apparent that Ranma wouldn't be speaking anytime soon. "Oh well. K, you wanna piece? K?"  
Chomp! Crunch! Snap! Gulp!  
A second sweatdrop joined the first as the demonic knight watched the metadragon gorge himself... on the miniguns from the dead grend gunners.  
"Dude... we coulda pawned those..."  
­­­

Former American military research base. Codename: Delta Prime. Location: India highlands. Primary function: central base for research team Delta, designated as the U.S. government's primary researchers of mana-based artifact recovery and analysis. Recorded time of facility operations shutdown: Unknown.

Whump! Whump! Thud!  
Two giant armored mecha skimmed the length of the desecrated base on wiry, reverse joint legs, crossing over craters and debris easily with every stride as they scanned the area vigilantly, their weapons constantly moving to cover any vector of enemy attack.  
Both the mecha bore an identical distinguishing mark on their large shoulder pauldrons: a downward-pointing triangle with an eight-pointed star pattern within it. Stamped over that emblem were the letters I.E.F., known to most of the modern world to be the Israeli Expeditionary Force.  
Walking in the wake of the mecha at a more sedate pace, a tall woman with sandy hair tied in a ponytail shook her head as she observed the wreckage of the facility. She was wearing what most people would consider a camouflage pattern one-piece bathing suit, weapons and utility belt, army boots, and leather gloves, although the more traveled or magic-friendly would have recognized the main outfit as being a simple sorceress's uniform, and the more military-minded would have recognized that the decorations tacked onto the breast of the outfit designated its wearer as a Colonel.  
Trailing the woman was a juga, its heavy gray carapace glinting in the early morning sun and almost making it seem as if the demon was sheathed in metal rather than a natural shell.  
The Colonel ripped a walkie-talkie from her belt and pushed the button. "Karen Molsk here. We've reached the facility's remains. At first glance, there appears to be no survivors, and the attackers are long gone."  
Affirmative, Colonel, a voice crackled back at her, have the recon mechs continue a sweep of the area and confirm that there are no enemy units present. Can you tell us anything about the current condition of the camp?  
"I can tell you lots of things," Karen said somberly. "It doesn't look like a single structure was spared obliteration. And the wreckage has obviously been carefully sifted through; it's likely the attackers took anything valuable or salvageable..." she looked distastefully around the compound. "Assuming there WAS anything valuable or salvagaeble after the bombardment. From the level of damage caused here, I'd guarantee that the hostiles were attempting to annihilate the base, not secure anything from it. I'd imagine anything that survived did so by pure chance."  
Is it possible they razed the facility after they stole its contents?  
Karen shrugged. "Possible, yes. If they were really willing to go through the trouble to dig through the blasted rubble so realistically. There was some serious moving done, and it was all done after this place was toasted." Then she grimaced. "On an unrelated note, the remains of the former personnel are still here. It looks like they were only moved to facilitate digging through the wrecked structures."  
Can you tell what did this?  
"Gimme a sec. Molsk out."  
Turning around, Karen noted that the juga that had accompanied her was leaning over a dismembered lower torso, its antennae extended.  
"Teema, you getting anything?"  
The demon looked up, and its mouthparts clicked together rapidly. "Krsh nahal saim ktk!"  
"Hmm... magic... but it doesn't look it was elemental in nature..." elemental magic, being the simplest and most common type among mages and sorcerors, mimicked natural forces such as ice, wind, and fire to cause damage. All of which would have left signs of their use. "There isn't even enough residual burning around the blast areas for them to have been caused by fire magic; the burns were caused through direct contact with the energy of the detonation." She scratched her chin as she observed one of the craters closely. "That leaves... lumina magic and shadow magic." She left unspoken which was more likely to be used to crush a human encampment as she took up her walkie-talkie once more.  
"This is Molsk again. Teema thinks a magi did it. Or at least most of it. Some of these bodies were killed in melee."  
This is Bloodhound 6, I've finished my recon rounds. Scanners are showing a few residual mana patterns. Too faint to make out anything, though.  
"And they're just as likely to be from the cleanup or the camp's experiments as from the attacker," Karen mused. "Still, there should be more than just 'a few'. I'm thinking shadow mages, here."  
Are you sure it's not from energy weapons? I'm reading a lot of electrostatic buildup.  
"Energy weapons? From where? The Empire has no beef with Americans digging way out here."  
Our initial reports suggest the facility had a shield generator. That may explain it.  
Karen sighed. "Okay, let's stop grasping at straws, here. 6, 4, you sure there're no nasties out there?"  
Roger. We're clean.  
"All right then. Let's get a crew out here to bag up the personnel for transport back to the U.S. Then we can get some more serious analysis done."  
Affirmative Colonel. We'll get to the bottom of this.

End Chapter 8 


	9. Enter the Light

Species: Evangelicon Sapien  
Common name: Evon  
Class: Mystic  
Subspecies: Several species of evon that have developed genetic proficiencies for certain magics or abilities have, on occasion, gathered together in isolated communities to form a closed gene pool. These have developed into the rare evon subspecies that boast very distinct birthmarks and natural abilities, such as the Raal evon and Criatus evon.  
Sentience & Intelligence: High. Evon show a wide variety of interests, skills, and areas of complex thought such that they are easily the intellectual equals of humans (as their variance in intelligence is also comparable, either species would have a difficult time deciding which, in general, is smarter than the other, and stereotypes would be meaningless). Evon showing a high capacity for mathematical skills that have been exposed to Earth technology have shown reasonably good comprehension of scientific laws and principles.  
Physical biology: Extremely human-like, evon have the exact same physical structure and - as far as our research shows so far - the exact same biology. The only physical means in which to tell an evon from a human is the presence of several "birth marks" that are located on the face, and sometimes the chest and arms. These marks come in a variety of shapes and colors, but they are usually vibrant, distinct, and often likened to tattoos.  
Mana resonance: Much higher than the human average, evon show a great predisposition toward pattern-based spellcasting, being able to sense and manipulate mana more easily than a human. They typically have no natural magical abilities, save perhaps their lifespan. However, this predisposition toward spellcasting only assists in learning its manipulation more quickly; it would seem that fully able evon magi are no more adept than the elven and human equivalents, though far more common.  
Lifespan: Similar to that of angels, an evon that does not study any magical arts capable of extending its life can expect to die of natural causes after about 6,000 years.  
Diet: Omnivorous. Diet varies depending on upbringing and personal taste, but in this too the evon are very similar to humans.  
Biological anomalies: Many have suggested that the marks that evon bear might be an indication of certain traits present in the DNA and otherwise expressed. It has been proven that the marks are largely hereditary, but a much deeper meaning has been hinted at. Unfortunately, the studies required to test such a thing are far too large in scope to be feasible at this time. Another anomaly is that evon often mate with humans, and strangely enough, the child produced seems to be a full evon, rather than having its traits diluted by human blood (this is difficult to judge without extensive testing, however, as humans and evon are so similar already).  
Reproductive type: Sexual.  
Social structure: Evon are a slight oddity among the noble races, as they do not possess much of a group identity, or an innate fondness for their own species beyond being the mating material of choice. Settlements that consist entirely of evon are rare, and they are not known to band together with other evon for any purpose unless, for some reason, only other evon are available or willing. Much like humans, they tend to seek out their individual fortunes and are generally open-minded and not prone to prejudice. An evon is just as likely to aid or fight alongside a demon as an elf, depending on the individual's preferences and understanding, which supposedly infuriates the other noble races.  
Combat analysis: Higher than average. Evon consistently have slightly better reflexive abilities and regenerative abilities than humans. In all other aspects, they are largely dependant upon their training and weapons.  
Misc. notes: Evon were originally mistaken to be demons, as they were first seen among the leading class in the Death March's vanguard forces. Although they share no actual kinship or similarity with demons, evon are often found working and fighting alongside them, and are usually well-respected among the demonic groups for their intellect (which is almost always much higher than the demonic average). Likewise, an evon is just as likely to live a quiet life on a farm or in a city among peaceful, placid creatures. It should be noted that dozens of evon have volunteered for military service ever since it was allowed by the military board. As evon have a natural talent for spellcasting, evon magi are commonplace, and entire companies of them are always available for hire as soldiers and mercenaries.

US Research Division Omega - Survey File N664

Nexus II  
by Black Dragon Vote Quimby.

Chapter 9  
Enter the Light

"As you can see Cardinal Risal, everything has been completely prepared for the ceremony, and the reception has already been fully organized. Things should progress with no problems at all. At least, until the main event. At that point, who knows what will happen?"  
The tall, blonde elf woman giggled as she led a bearded human through the halls of the grand cathedral, gesturing toward the large, ornate windows toward the construction being finished up outside.  
The man, who wore simple yellow robes and carried a thick, ruby-topped staff nodded absently, looking content. "Yes, it would seem you've done your job well. Things should proceed smoothly." He turned away from the windows, glancing at the many doorways on the other side of the hall. "However, I really did want a more complete tour of the cathedral. This may be my only chance to see Taer'Kul, and this cathedral looks so much... DIFFERENT than all the others I've seen. Why, even the lights are different!"  
The elven woman nodded somewhat reluctantly, turning away from the work outside. "Yes, well... I find it slightly regrettable myself, but inevitably building a cathedral on Earth realm involved integrated the humans' technology into its design. The lights you see, which would normally be crystals modeled and enchanted to give off light, are glass containers fit over a metal filament. These are plugged into electrical circuits, and give off light." She sighed. "However, they burn out quite often and must be replaced, and the constant drain on electricity is alarming in its inefficiency."  
Risal nodded, staring upward. "Perhaps they are inefficient... but effective. It takes five normal crystals to produce that much light, and for a structure of this size, the initial cost would be enormous." He looked back down at a heating vent on the floor. "And I heard that warmth and heat comes out of these slits here, when the temperature is uncomfortable. A far more graceful solution than heating stoves, mana-powered or no."  
The woman sighed. "Yes, well, technology has its uses. But the fool architects went too far, trying to replace magical components and affects with technological equivalents. Not to mention that the same machines tend to malfunction whenever we're performing a ceremony of significant power!"  
"Now, now, Saima. Control yourself. You must learn to adapt to the cultures you intend to preach to; demeaning their preference for conveniences does nothing but isolate yourself," the cardinal said sagely as he walked down the hall.  
The bishop winced and lowered her head. "F-Forgive me, Cardinal. I do not usually make such a fool of myself during lectures; but sometimes I yearn for the purity and sophistication of a proper society."  
'Of course, 'proper society' being elf society,' Risal thought to himself. 'Oh well. Can't expect much better from an elf raised in an elven city.'  
"But isn't this exciting?" Saima said, deciding to change the subject, "To think, that the fourth avatar should be chosen HERE! Another hero of Malakai, to bless our order with the light!"  
"Personally, I don't find it nearly as exciting," the cardinal drawled. "The assignment of a new fourth avatar only follows the death of the old one. I knew Yaaralam personally, and his murder is extremely unfortunate."  
Saima sweatdropped, and her eyebrow twitched slightly. 'Geez, I just can't get on this guy's good side...'  
"His replacement will likely be young and inexperienced, and it will take time to forge the new avatar into a worthy hero. A process of decades, at very least. And during that time, our order will lose significant ground."  
Saima winced, and then sighed. Yaaralam, who had been one of the five avatars that lead the Order of Malakai's crusades across the realms, had been overwhelmed and slain by a Fifth Brotherhood raiding party around a battle front in some far-off realm. Such losses were not irreplaceable, as the Order of Malakai boasted more avatars than any other religious powers (the eight Brotherhoods, for example, only had one each), but it was a severe setback to an organization spread so widely in its efforts.  
That the Oracle had predicted the rise of the next avatar here on Earth realm was a surprise to everybody, and the Order of Malakai had significant difficulty preparing. Their foothold on Earth was unusually weak, and as it stood, the Order only had one cathedral built by the time the Oracle's message had reached the proper authorities.  
'We would have a stronger presence here on Earth if it weren't for those blasted humans,' Saima thought ruefully, glancing around at the mighty structure around her. By the time that the Order had learned of a mass demonic exodus into a formerly sealed realm and set out to investigate, the Death March was already well under way, and Malakai's paladins and clerics eventually marched out to war only to find human armies stamping out the last shattered remnants of the monster horde. What had been more shocking was the surprisingly cold reception they had gotten from the survivors; rather than employing them and assisting their operations, these humans attempted to control their settlement and restrict access to their cities. It was quite galling for the noble bishops who served the God of Justice, and yet even the Order found itself at the mercy of local weapons.  
Risal turned toward a door in the hall and read the sign next to the door. "So this is the library, hm? Do you have a very large collection, yet?"  
Once again, an indignant scowl marred Saima's delicate features. "Yes, actually. Unfortunately it's mostly rubbish from this realm. Apparently the humans around here have written a great, great number of books, and some of our priests became too enthralled in acquiring them. While there are some useful tomes on history, and the occasional manual explaining the bizarre gadgets these humans make, a great many are falsified stories about all manners of things intended for the amusement of the reader. A complete waste of time and paper, I assure you, but these fools made it so easy to create a book, it's now impossible to tell a useful tome from a useless one."  
"Huh. How odd!" Risal said, honestly intrigued. "For amusement? I'd like to take one or two with me, then. You don't sound like you'd miss them."  
The bishop desperately kept from rolling her eyes. 'Geh. Leave it to a human to accept this nonsense.' "You may take as many as you like, of course." She said pleasantly, going ahead and opening the door for the old man. "Though I'm not sure... what... you'd..."  
Saima trailed off as she beheld a giant pile of books scattered all over the central tables in the library, which was otherwise empty. Also empty were several shelving units where the books were usually stored, their contents lying haphazardly in the middle of the room.  
Risal blinked, and was about to ask about the disarray of the room, when he noticed that Saima's normally pale face had turned an unhealthy shade of red, which complemented her hateful scowl perfectly. 'Hmmm... I'm guessing she already has a culprit in mind...'  
"DAMN IT ALL! KAZE TOREN, WHERE ARE YOU!"  
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Elsewhere, seated at a bar located well away from the local cathedrals, a tall man with long, snow white hair suddenly shuddered as he picked up a malevolent psychic shock wave.  
"Kaze? You all right, man?"  
The white-haired man, who bore several distinct blue marks on his face that resembled slash marks sighed. "I suddenly have the feeling I'm in a lot of trouble."  
One of Kaze's two companions, a tough-looking harlock man who bore the leathery blue skin of his species underneath a suit of leather armor chuckled. "Little late for that, aren't you? If a priest of Malakai doesn't want to get in trouble, he shouldn't be ditching his duties so he can gamble in a tavern."  
The other man, who was a short wood elf, smirked. "I've said it before, and I'll say it again: You're the worst priest ever."  
"Oh, I don't know," Kaze mumbled as he stared at the cards in his hands, "give yourself more credit than that. You're worthy competition, at least. Now are you going to bet, or what?"  
The wood elf glared, and dropped several silver pieces on the table. "So what duties did you ditch, exactly, that you suddenly act like Kharak himself is at your back?"  
"Just the typical studying and prayer stuff. No big deal. I can pray and study anytime," Kaze mumbled, scratching his chin. "Not that it pleases the bishop. I can't imagine why she'd be very surprised or upset for me ditching prayer, though." He shrugged. "Whatever. There's no pleasing those stupid elves."  
The wood elf glared much more hotly this time. "_Ahem!_"  
Kaze blinked. "Oh, right!" Then he slipped a gold coin into the pile. "I raise you."  
"That's NOT what I was... oh, forget it," their elven companion mumbled miserably.  
The harlock put his money in. "Wasn't there another job you had to do, though?"  
"No, not that I recall," Kaze said absently.  
The blue-skinned rogue raised an eyebrow. "Oh? So you took care of the mess you caused in the library? Or did you get someone else to do it?"  
"..." Kaze turned toward the elf. "Are you going to see my bet, or cop out?"  
The elf smirked once again as he put in his money. "You completely forgot, didn't you?"  
"Not really. I wasn't listening to a word Saima said when she chewed me out for that. So I plead ignorance."  
"Ignorance won't save you this time."

The three men all sweatdropped as a glowing figure stalked up behind Kaze, causing all the other customers and bar maids to scatter out of the way.  
"Ah. Bishop Saima. An excellent day, isn't it? Tell me, has the cardinal arrived yet?" Kaze said conversationally while not looking away from his cards. Which wasn't fooling anybody, as sweat had started pouring down his brow.  
"Such a... UNIQUE example of our Lord's teachings," the blonde elf said through clenched teeth. "Ransacking the main library searching for books you are not allowed to have. Sneaking off cathedral grounds without permission. Ignoring your duties so that you can gamble in seedy taverns. Now I say to you, in the interest of proper justice, have you anything to say in your defense?"  
Kaze nodded somberly. "Yes. Yes, I do." Then he laid down his cards. "I win."  
The harlock groaned at the sight of Kaze's full house, and crossed his arms in disgust. The wood elf, however, was still smiling even as Kaze quickly gathered up his money. "Heh. Worst priest EVER."  
"And what about YOU?" Saima suddenly said to the other two men, catching them off-guard. "What do you think you're doing? A rogue, I can somewhat understand, but YOU," and this time she pointed directly at the shorter elven man, "what is an elven priest doing gambling with HIM?"  
The wood elf raised an eyebrow. "Uh... I'm well aware that the Order of Malakai discourages gambling, but neither my race nor my faith does the same." He tapped the sigil on his cloak that identified him as an acolyte of the Church of Sayg.  
"That's not the point!" Saima insisted, "why are you gambling with Toren? Don't you know he's psychic?"  
"WELL! It would seem that I have done a great wrong, both to you, good Bishop, and to my honored faith!" Kaze bolted upright and bowed to Saima, sweating much more profusely now. "However, I must take responsibility for my actions immediately! Come on! Hurry! Let's make with the punishing!" Kaze grabbed the high elf's hand and started for the door, but stopped when he felt cold steel across his neck.  
"There will be punishment all right, FRIEND," the harlock said dangerously, a vein popping up on his forehead. "I always noticed that you tended to win more than was strictly plausible..."  
"You can prove nothing!" Kaze said desperately. "My psychic training was for the purposes of detecting lies and judging character!"  
The wood elf growled as he stood up. "So we'll ask you right out, then. Have you ever cheated in our games?"  
"In the interests of proper justice," Kaze began, mimicking the bishop's line, "I would like to utilize an ingenious doctrine that the humans drafted to protect the accused. I believe it's called the 'Fifth Amendment'."  
"DIE, EVON SCUM!"

The harlock, while quite upset at the time, wasn't about to go so far as to actually kill a priest from behind, in front of his superior, in a city where his church held significant power, over small-stakes poker. Angling the knife down slightly to minimize the chance of cutting the jugular by mistake, the blue-skinned rogue brought up his elbow to smash Kaze in the back of his skull.  
_Vwom!_ The rogue was quite surprised when he was suddenly blown off balance by a wave of kinetic force, foiling his attack and throwing him backward into an occupied table.  
Kaze swirled around, ignoring the gasps and sudden yells from the bar's patrons. "Sae! Ywon! Lao! Sleep!" He pointed two fingers at the harlock rogue, and a tiny magic circle formed over his forehead and started rotating as a light mist appeared around the rogue, quickly weakening him into unconsciousness.  
"Bastard! Won't even take your punishment like a man, will you?" The elf growled, holding a ball of light in his hand. "Light! Emerge and strike down the unworthy! Sunfire arrow!"  
Three arrows of light burst from the elf's hand and rocketed toward Kaze, one aimed for each leg, with the third heading for the evon's chest.  
_Bwomf! Boomf! Gwom!_ Each one hammered uselessly into a transparent bubble that surrounded the priest, doing little more than causing light ripples that made Kaze's magic shield temporarily visible to the bar patrons.  
Kaze sighed and started digging into his tunic. "Sayg's purpose toward servants of the light does not involve punishment, but rather forgiveness and understanding." Then he pulled out a talisman: a small, rectangular piece of paper with an arcane rune delicately painted on it. "So please understand that I have no choice at this point. And forgive me."  
The wood elf flinched and started to back off. 'N-No way! A magical shield? That lazy, good-for-nothing priest can summon a magical shield without a proper incantation? AND he can use talismanic magic? This is ridiculous!' "Don't think it'll be that-" the elven priest began his taunt, only to find Kaze running forward toward him much faster than he had expected. "H-Hey! Wait just a-"  
_Slap!_ Kaze pressed the talisman against the short elf's chest, and used his momentum to spin away from the desperate right hook that followed. "Incantis saelinae! Bind!"  
"Urk!" The elf tumbled onto the floor as suspiciously solid tendrils of vicious cyclonic wind suddenly burst from the talisman and wrapped around him, completely hindering the movement of his limbs. "You bastard!"

Kaze grinned and dusted his hands off before gesturing to the bar patrons and employees who were watching. "It's all right, no problems here. There won't be any more trouble, I assure you!"  
Then his face darkened as he felt someone grab him by the back of his tunic. "Oh, there'll be a little more trouble, yet."  
"Ah. Saima," the miscreant priest said miserably. "You were so quiet during the scuffle I had forgotten about you. Is it possible you could do the same for me?"  
"Is this the conduct of our clergy nowadays?" The bishop seethed. "You wallow in sin, stab your friends in the back, and then leave them bound or unconscious in a hovel full of shady characters like this?"  
Kaze smiled inwardly, having gained slightly more sympathy from the crowd after they had been insulted by his superior. "First of all, incapacitating them in self-defense is far from 'back-stabbing'. And second of all, it's safe to say they're not my friends anymore."  
"You got that right, you filthy, good for nothing, sl-"  
Kaze made a sharp gesture with his hand, and another magic tendril snaked out of the talisman over the wood elf's mouth.  
"But this debate is pointless. Shall we go?" Kaze asked pleasantly, wanting to leave the bar before they decided to ban him permanently.  
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

_Wham!_  
Kaze yelped and rolled along the marble floors of his home cathedral as he was forcibly thrown through the main doors, attracting the attention of the numerous acolytes, priests, and paladins that had gathered within the reception hall.  
All of those present recognized the evon immediately, and came to the same conclusion as to what had happened. The acolytes chuckled, the priests muttered insults under their breaths, and the paladins smirked and shook their heads.  
Kaze immediately rose to his feet and started to dust himself off. "You know, as a bishop, you're setting a very poor impression for the-"  
"SHUT UP." Saima commanded, trembling as she stalked up to the evon. "Cardinal Risal is here to administer one of our most sacred ceremonies today; a ceremony that could tip the balance of power on this realm and a dozen others. A **CARDINAL**, Toren. One of only a dozen in ALL the thousands of cathedrals, churches, and temples we have all across the realms. And instead of attending to him, I'm wasting my time hunting you down to ensure that you don't shirk your duties!"  
Kaze sighed. "You didn't HAVE to go yourself, you know."  
Saima twitched. "Well, every time I send someone ELSE, they inevitably get **sidetracked**. You know, things like being attacked by elementals out of nowhere, having large objects suddenly fall on them, chasing down illusions; that sort of thing. Now isn't that strange?"  
A sweatdrop rolled down Kaze's head. "Why Bishop, that almost sounds like an accusation."  
The elf grit her teeth. "Don't you realize that the only thing keeping you from being tossed out onto the streets is the fact that your father is Archbishop? A post that you yourself stand to inherit, IF you can last a mere MONTH without committing a grievance against this church!"  
Kaze blinked, then nodded. "Yes, I'm well aware of that. It's quite convenient, too."  
"GRAAAUGH!" Saima grasped her head in frustration as she growled, and several of the other priests warily approached to try and comfort her.  
Behind Kaze, a large male angel in heavy, enchanted plate mail approached while chuckling deeply. "Come now, Bishop. Go easy on the kid, eh? What was it this time? Gambling?"  
Saima glared at the blonde paladin. "Gambling. And fighting. And deceit. And neglecting his duties."  
The angel sweatdropped, and Kaze just shrugged helplessly.  
"Again, the fighting was in self-defense, gambling is a very minor grievance, and I still have no memory of being told to clean the library," Kaze explained.  
"And do you have an explanation for cheating at cards?" Then she frowned. "Or better yet, if you have no memory of it, explain how you knew what 'duty' you were neglecting when I never told you."  
"That's... complicated," Kaze mumbled, not wanting to explain how he had employed a rogue to help him get some spell books he was specifically told he couldn't have, and how that same rogue knew enough about the incident to figure out that cleaning it up had probably been tasked to him.  
He turned toward the angel. "So! Chiima! You ready for the big ceremony? You know I'm rooting for you, big guy!" Kaze winked and slapped the angel on the back. "I know you're gonna make avatar! I just know it!"  
_Thwack!_ Kaze rubbed his head irritably once Saima dislodged her staff from it.  
"Don't ignore me! You'll be punished for this, Toren!"  
Kaze wagged a finger at her. "Bishop, please! It won't take more than an hour to put up the books. I'll do it right now. I'll even have time afterward to attend the opening ceremonies for the avatar selection."  
Saima was about to tell him to hurry up and get on his way, when something Kaze said registered in her head and gave her an idea.  
Kaze raised an eyebrow as the elven bishop grinned. Now what?  
"Toren, I'm afraid making you do your work later isn't going to be enough this time. You'll clean the library, and then make copies of Father Glane's notes he's been working on this past week."  
The priest winced. That was going to take a much longer time than shelving books; for one thing, it was a task that his telekinetic abilities couldn't help him with. He sighed in resignation.  
"And," Saima continued gleefully, "you will do this IMMEDIATELY after cleaning the library, while the avatar's ceremony is being conducted."  
"Wh-Wh-WHAT!" Kaze shrieked, causing everyone else in the room to wince (as much from the punishment as from the noise). "That's ridiculous! This is the most important occasion that may ever occur during my life of service to Malakai! An occasion that I've had the incredible luck to stumble upon volunteering to help construct the cathedrals on Earth! And you're going to refuse to let me see it because I was gambling?" Kaze was livid as the elf crossed her arms over her chest.  
"Don't pretend like this is coming at you out of the blue; you've been given repeated warnings and suffered the lightest punishments due to your family's status. And again and again you disobey. This is an opportunity to give you a severe reprimand that won't have any lasting consequences, and therefore won't cause me any trouble with the archbishops."  
Kaze seethed. "You can't do this! Do you have any idea how much money I have riding on this ceremony? Do you know how many people are expecting a betting pool at the front? And you're going to make me miss it!"  
The elf simply stared back at him, unimpressed by the retort.  
"I'm not helping my case any, am I?" The evon said miserably, to which the elf shook her head.  
Saima smirked and turned around. "Now if you'll excuse me, I must get back to making the Cardinal comfortable. YOU get to work."

"But... money... avatar... ceremony... Cardinal... eggs..." Kaze stuttered incoherently at the elf's back, slowly slumping to his knees.  
Chiima sighed and patted the slightly shorter man on the head. "Well, I'm afraid I don't have much comfort to offer you this time. You've had that coming."  
Kaze flinched. 'Leave it to a Knight of Judgment to skimp on the sympathy.' "Regardless, it's a disservice to the Order to intentionally exclude a future archbishop from such an important ceremony!" He complained, slowly standing up.  
The angel weighed that argument, and then shook his head. "Why is it that when you're facing consequences you're 'a future archbishop,' but during your studies you're a 'victim of expectations'? You always claim that you never wanted to be an archbishop until it becomes convenient."  
Kaze flushed slightly. "Well, yes. I never wanted to be archbishop. That role was chosen for me. You know that!" Then he coughed into his fist. "But if I'm to be forced into it anyway, why shouldn't I receive that consideration?"  
"'Hypocrisy bears no rewards but a broken faith and a shadowed heart,'" Chiima quoted from the Order's scripture, causing Kaze to wince again.  
'Feh. He's acting rather high-and-mighty today.' Kaze sweatdropped. 'But why not? By all accounts, Chiima is the only reasonable candidate for avatar around here.'  
The evon sighed. "Well, I've built my gallows, and now I'll hang from them. Fare thee well."  
The angel nodded, smiling warmly. "If they do select me, I'll see what I can do about having you accompany me; I know you've always envied adventurers a bit, and you're far more adept in combat magic than any cleric I know."  
Kaze blinked, deeply moved. "I... w-would you? Really?"  
"Yes, I think I will. Malakai be with you, Priest." Chiima bowed low, showing the most formal gesture of respect for the clergy.  
"And may Malakai be with you, Paladin," Kaze said more cheerfully than before. Then he laughed. "Ah, but he WILL be with you very soon, won't he?"  
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ranma massaged his forehead as he kept his other hand clamped tight over Rayden's mouth, trying to gather his thoughts and his nerve as the guards at the gate glared at them.  
"Ray, I don't care WHAT your problem is. Just give them your weapons like they asked."  
"Mfffg gahm hmrf rhgl," Rayden mumbled angrily, jabbing a thumb at his broadsword.  
"What did I just say? I don't CARE. They won't let us in unless we disarm. We have to go in for supplies and stuff. Therefore, we have to disarm."  
One of the elven men crossed his arms over his chest. "You're lucky we're letting you in at all. In more dangerous times a... creature such as yourself would have been killed on sight."  
K winced as Rayden glared back at them. Although demons and even paladins belonging to the eight Dark Brotherhoods were allowed to enter and roam Taer'Kul, they were far from welcome to do so. The Church of Sayg, the Divine order of Light, had been at war with all of the Brotherhoods ever since the factions had learned of each others' existence, and it was only the far more tolerant Order of Malakai and Sanctuary of Thajal that kept the more powerful Church from keeping a tighter hold on the city.  
Ranma gave the guard a dirty look, well aware that the two elves that had greeted them were intentionally provoking them in order to create an excuse to turn them away. "Like you have anything to worry about. Every priest, monk, and guard in the entire city is going to be keeping an eye on us. I just want to buy some stuff and leave, all right?"  
"Not until you both surrender your armaments!" The second guard shouted.  
Rayden twitched and tried to step forward, but Ranma shoved him back.  
"All right, look. See this, Ray? I'll give up my weapons first, okay?" Making a big show of the entire process, Ranma unstrapped his sword and ammo belt and then handed the guard both the katana and his firearm.  
The guard nodded. "Okay, now you-" Then he stopped as Ranma dumped three wakazashi short swords on the table at the gate station. "Huh? Oh... you had more?"  
"Have more," Ranma corrected, holding his arm out and shaking it.  
_Clink! Clack! Clink! Tink!_ The guards' faces darkened as dozens of throwing daggers slid out of Ranma's sleeve and collected on the table.  
"Wh... How... But..." The first guard gaped. "How do you move with all those without cutting yourself?"  
"Practice," Ranma said blithely, removing the short blades from his boots and placing them too on the table.

As the pigtailed man started to remove the daggers from his OTHER sleeve, the second guard pulled the first back so that they could speak without being overheard.  
"I'm not sure this is such a good idea; the big one is suspicious enough, but this one-"  
"Don't be a fool!" the other elf hissed. "This entire city is blanketed with holy magic! The Dread Knight should be less than powerless! And that pitiful-looking dragon probably couldn't hurt a halfling!"  
"B-But, even so, this one here looks human! What're we to do if-"  
"He's just a human, idiot! As long as we disarm him, he's nothing!"

Ranma twitched irritably as the elves came back. "Y'know, just 'cause my ears are smaller than yours doesn't mean they don't work."  
"Silence yourself, vagrant," the first guard snapped, "are you QUITE finished disarming?"  
Ranma nodded, and then frowned as he felt a slight buzzing sensation in his head. 'Huh. Is he psychic? Must be scanning me for lies.'  
Satisfied, the guard turned toward Rayden. "Now you. Give me that sword immediately. And keep in mind that while in our fair city, your life is worth less than the note pad we'll use to describe how it ended, demon filth."  
After a moment of fighting the urge to surrender the blade to the elf pointy end first, Rayden smirked and unstrapped it. "Okay, okay. Here." Then he held it by the sheath and offered it to the guard by pointing the handle at him.  
_Smack!_ "Bad demon knight!" Ranma said, backhanding Rayden across the face.  
Wincing, Rayden sighed and turned the blade around so that the sheath was pointing at the confused guards. "Here. Don't touch the handle, or you'll get shocked." After they carefully took it while scowling at him, he rummaged around in his coat for a few seconds and placed his twin bolter pistols on the table alongside Ranma's weapons. "So how exactly do we go about getting our stuff back when we leave?"  
Both elves glared at him, prompting him to continue glaring back.  
"They'll know which weapon is YOURS just from meeting with you. As for the rest of them, here's a ticket to get them back." The higher ranking templar scribbled on a small piece of paper and tossed it haphazardly at Ranma, who snatched it out of the air. "Try not to take in too much civilization at once, now; you're not used to it, after all."  
"Yeah, yeah," Ranma mumbled, wondering how much of this treatment he would have been spared had he come alone. "C'mon Ray, hurry it up."

The three wanderers entered the city in silence, immediately noting that the numerous templars and monks that were stationed or passing by the main palisade gate all stopped talking and stared at their passing. Some looked upon them in wonder, some in curiosity, and a few in fear, but most simply scowled and then went upon their business.  
"This was a bad idea. I could've just had you wait outside the city limits. Or made you take off that damn crest," Ranma mumbled, noting that he was getting even more scowls and frowns than Rayden was. No doubt they expected better from a human than to be accompanying a Dread Knight.  
"I woulda preferred that, actually," Rayden mumbled irritably. "I don't like this atmosphere... it's like... it's like the air itself is trying to purify me or somethin'." Then he scowled. "Also, I don't like being without my sword. We shouldn't have left Darkrune with those elven brats."  
"Agreed. But Ranma has a point," K noted calmly, taking the stares far better than his humanoid companions, "we just have some shopping to do and then we can leave this rotten place."  
Ranma's mood sunk further. Taer'Kul was not supposed to **be** a rotten place. He had visited the city once before when it was much smaller, and been treated very warmly. He had even gotten special deals on goods by doing small jobs for the local temples, and had built a minor reputation before he had left.  
'And now I'm building another minor reputation,' he thought darkly. 'And as much as I'd like to say that it's not Rayden's fault and that he's just as much a victim of these people as I am... he's more prejudiced and hateful than they are.' _Sigh_.  
"So what's the deal, Ray? Do your people actually have something against all these folks, or what?" Ranma asked, trying to strike up a conversation to help take his mind off all the stares.  
Rayden shrugged. "I don't think we do, actually. I mean, the only one of the three Divine Circles the Third Brotherhood is at war with is the Church of Sayg, and we haven't actually fought any battles with them for way longer than I've been alive."  
"Keeping in mind, of course, that their history is recorded in millenia, while you're like, what, twenty-five?" K noted.  
"Er... twenty-two," Rayden mumbled. "But anyway, the Order of Malakai doesn't bug us because most of our cruelty and hateful deeds are done through direct, organized warfare, while we're generally pretty disciplined and law-abiding in-between battles. The Sanctuary of Thajal is pacifistic, so we don't bother them at all. No point in attacking an organization that won't fight back. Worthless cowards."  
Ranma frowned. "Wait... so the Divine Circles aren't allies?"  
"Well, they're more allied than the Dark Brotherhoods, in that they're never at war with each other, but no, not really. They have their own competing dogmas and ideas about how to make the realms all happy and peaceful and lame, so they spend as much time tripping over each other as they do getting anything done."  
"Specifically, the Order pursues specific ethical issues that must be addressed by force of arms, the Church defies all manner of darkness and evil and seeks to purge it all, and the Sanctuary just wants to kick back and heal people," K explained, once again producing much more information than his companions were strictly interested in. "The Order is surprisingly lenient with the Brotherhoods; only the Church of Sayg wants them all destroyed."  
"I guess that explains why they'd let one of their warriors into the city," Ranma mumbled, noting that they were being followed by several angry-looking templars who watched them from a set distance away, matching their pace, "though you're still far from welcome."  
Rayden shrugged. "Least you can expect from elven slime. And don't get me STARTED on angels-"  
"I won't," Ranma said sharply, "so keep that opinion to yourself. NOW WHAT?"

The pigtailed wanderer growled as he turned a street corner, only to see a huge crowd of people filling the streets, all milling about and facing a grand cathedral constructed of gleaming marble. The structure had massive towers on every outside corner of its outer wall, and above the main entryway, which was itself completely obscured by the crowd, there was a large, circular stained glass window that showed a red and yellow image of what looked like a slightly warped, backward "E" with triangles positioned above and below the circle.  
Ranma frowned. "That's Malakai's crest, isn't it?"  
"Yep. Lawmongers," Rayden mumbled, crossing his arms over his chest. "Tho' I don't know what all these people are doing here. The Priest-judges don't usually draw a big crowd."  
"Well, they're not carrying torches and pitchforks. So much for the worst-case scenario," Ranma mumbled. "Actually, it doesn't look like they really notice you at all."  
At that moment several large angels and elves in gleaming white and silver armor emerged from the crowd, all of them slowly drawing their weapons as they approached the two men and their draconian companion.  
"Oops. Spoke too soon," Ranma murmured, watching as everybody nearby quickly sprinted away to leave them isolated.  
One of the angels, a tall, well-muscled blonde man with golden armor sheathes over the top of his wings approached the trio as all the others stopped short. Ranma confirmed that this man, as well as the others, all had the crest of Malakai emblazoned on their armor.  
"You there! You carry the mark of Kharak, demon!" The angel said, pointing his broadsword at Rayden. "What business could you possibly have here?"  
Before Rayden could say anything to make the situation worse, Ranma shoved him back and answered for him. "We have no business here. We're trying to get to the market and all these people are in our way. Is there a way around?"  
The angel frowned. "And who are you, human?"  
Ranma raised an eyebrow. "I'm not the one waving a sword around in some unarmed guy's face. Tell me who you are, and what the problem is, and I'll consider answering your question."  
One of the elven paladins stepped forward, seething. "Why you insolent little-"  
The angel raised an arm up, stopping him. "Halt. The human's words have merit." Then he glared down at Ranma, resting his sword point-down in the ground with his hands resting on top. "My name is Chiima, Captain of the Order Paladin Corp here in Taer'Kul. I find your association with a dark paladin in this place and at this time to be highly suspicious. Now answer MY question."  
"This time? Why? What's going on?" K asked curiously.  
"It doesn't matter. It doesn't involve us," Ranma said, not wanting to be held up any more. "My name is Ranma Saotome. This is a traveling companion of mine, Rayden Shikodan. I know he's a Dread Knight, but he's good company. We have no interest in hurting, killing, or in any way harming anyone here. I just want to get to the market, find an enchanter's shop, and then leave."  
Rayden smirked. "Yeah! And you-" _Bwack!_  
Ranma twitched as he ground his fist further into Rayden's face. "THANK YOU Ray, but I don't need any help with this."  
The paladins all sweatdropped heavily, and started to look more unsure about what was going on.  
"You... uh... seem to have a rather... tight leash on your demon friend, there," Chiima noted, smirking slightly.  
"Yeah, well, isn't that what you want?" Ranma asked irritably.  
Chiima snorted, but slowly resheathed his sword. "Very well, you may go. Use the side road back there and to the right." He pointed behind Ranma, who noted the direction and nodded. "I must ask, however, that you remain as far as possible from this cathedral."  
"Gladly," Ranma agreed immediately. "Any other places we should avoid?"  
"The cathedral of the Church of Sayg also might welcome you a bit harshly," the angel said, pointing across town at a tall golden spire that extended above all the buildings in the way. "And they're not quite as fond of laws that they don't personally agree with as we are. You cross their members at your own peril."  
"Got it. See ya around, wings," Ranma murmured, causing the paladins to flinch at his overly casual tone.  
After giving the angel paladin a final, nasty glare, Rayden turned away and followed Ranma down the street, wishing harder than ever that he could feel the comforting weight and burning power of his sword.

Chiima frowned at the demon's back. 'He called that thing a Dread Knight... what would a full-fledged Dread Knight be doing in servitude to a human?' The dark paladins of the Third Brotherhood were among the most powerful warriors in all the realms, being the most experienced elite of the strongest demonic breeds. Even the youngest and weakest among them were leagues beyond the capability of a freshly trained paladin from the Order or the Church; only the dark paladins from the Second Brotherhood were more powerful on the whole.  
One thing was certain, though: no human that associated with a Dark Cult could be trusted near a Divine cathedral, especially at such a critical time. That he would make himself known by openly approaching was a point against him being an assassin or saboteur (who would have probably had enough information not to have to confirm the location of the cathedral ahead of time), but no chances could be taken.  
"Master Chiima, sir?" The angel turned around to see a young neophyte priest bowing to him. "The ceremony is about to begin. Your presence is requested in the main courtyard."  
Chiima nodded. The security of the cardinal was in his hands, and he would not fail. 'No matter what is asked of me, I will do my duty. Such is the will of my god.'  
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Many had expected the ceremony to select the new avatar to be a solemn, private affair, perhaps done in the ceremonial chambers within the cathedral and attended to by a small company of priests and likely candidates for avatar.  
Instead the rite had something of a "school rally" feel to it, and the brilliant ivory fountains and golden arches which decorated the courtyard and held up enchanted amplification crystals for the ceremony was slightly spoiled by the sight of most of the low-ranking membership of the cathedral seated on cheap aluminum bleachers. Those same members watched the priests and bishops gather below in front of the paladins that had assembled in a line in the courtyard. The priests formed a half-circle around the bishops, who kneeled as the Cardinal stepped forward bearing the holy object atop a red velvet pillow: a large yellow sphere roughly the size of a man's head.  
Risal sweatdropped slightly as he looked around at the crowd. 'Not quite as... dignified as I expected. Still, there's no use splitting hairs.'  
Raising one hand over the translucent yellow orb, Risal chanted a few words under his breath, and then let the arm supporting the pillow drop, causing the pillow and sphere to wobble uncertainly in mid-air.  
There was scattered applause, which caused the cardinal to sweatdrop again, and caused Saima to blush slightly from where she still kneeled before Risal.  
"SPIRIT THAT LIVES WITHIN THE HOLY JEWEL, EYE OF MALAKAI! SOUL THAT WATCHES OVER THE SERVANTS OF JUSTICE, GUIDES THEM, JUDGES THEM, AND MAKES THEM WHOLE! GRANT US YOUR POWER, YOUR FORESIGHT! TELL US, OH GREAT LORD MALAKAI, WHICH OF YOUR CHILDREN WOULD YOU HAVE AS YOUR VESSEL?"  
The cardinal extended his arm toward the gathered paladins. "THOSE WHO STAND BEFORE YOU ARE JUDGED TO BE PURE OF HEART, DEDICATED IN SPIRIT, AND FIERCELY SKILLED! WHO AMONG YOUR CHILDREN WILL BEAR YOUR DIVINATIONS, TO BE WATCHED OVER SO LONG AS THEIR HEART BEATS, TO BE UNTO DEATH UNDER YOUR PROTECTION AND BE THE LIASON OF YOUR WILL?"  
The yellow sphere began to glow, and the red pillow slowly fell to the ground as the orb slowly rose higher, only this time without any incantation from the cardinal.  
"I, ONE OF THE TWELVE CHOSEN, LORD RISAL OF SEIN, WHO CLEANSED SEVEN WORLDS OF THE CRUEL TAINT OF SLAVERY IN YOUR GREAT NAME, ASK YOU NOW TO SPEAK THROUGH ME! TELL US, YOUR SERVANTS, WHO IS TO GUIDE THE NEXT GREAT AGE OF OUR ORDER!"  
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Okay, here. You hold onto our stuff," Ranma said, shoving his freshly stuffed pack into Rayden's arms. "I've got something else to do."  
The Dread Knight blinked. "Something else? Like what? Are you gonna take long?"  
Ranma shrugged apologetically. "I'll try not to, but I don't really know. I've been meaning to get this glove identified for a while." He tapped the gem implanted in his gauntlet. "Black glove, absorbs conducted ki, immune to your sword's powers, apparently indestructible, plus nobody can take it off my hand except me. Something tells me this is more than just a really cool item that happened to be in some slaver's loot. Also, I have to make sure it's not slowly draining away my life force or anything."  
"Also check to make sure it isn't slowly making you crazy," Rayden said, causing Ranma to stop short. "You know, it might be one of those deals where it constantly injects murderous, hateful thoughts into your brain, slowly but surely driving you toward the precipice of complete homicidal rage."  
Ranma and K both froze and stared at the demon knight. After a moment, K hopped off of Rayden's shoulder and flew over to Ranma's.  
"So... is that what happened to you?" Ranma asked uneasily.  
"Nah. I just have the standard dark, melodramatic backstory," Rayden said, shrugging. "Though I DO hear voices on occasion..."  
K twitched. "Okay. Yeah. I think I'll go with you," he mumbled into Ranma's ear. Then he spoke to Rayden. "We'll be back as soon as we can. Try not to get in any fights while we're gone, okay?"  
"Yeah, yeah..."  
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The cardinal slowly opened his eyes, finally emerging from his meditation after several minutes of silence.  
Though the bishops maintained their composure, several of the priests and paladins gasped; Risal's eyes, which had once been a soft brown, were now a pure white, with light bursting from behind his lens and cloaking the retina and pupil.  
"I SEE..." the old human began slowly, looking up into the air, "ONE OF THE DARK GODS' SERVANTS OPENLY WALKS THE STREETS OF OUR HOLY CITY! A PEON OF KHARAK, THE DESTROYER!"  
At once, gasps and murmurs rippled through the crowd, and several of the paladins glanced pensively at each other.  
Chiima's eyes narrowed.  
Risal's eyes slowly dulled back to normal, and he looked over the warriors and clergy before him unsteadily, as if in a drunken haze. "THE ONE TO BRING THIS DEMON KNIGHT TO JUSTICE IS THE CHOSEN AVATAR, TO BEAR THE EYE OF MALAKAI AND SEEK JUSTICE IN HIS NAME! THIS IS THE WORD OF MALAKAI! NO OTHER SHALL POSSESS THAT WHICH WAS ONCE THE FLESH OF OUR GREAT LORD!"  
Then, the cardinal convulsed violently, and several of the bishops started to their feet as he fell to his knees.

"Cardinal! Master Risal! Are you all right?" Saima quickly jumped ahead of the others and grabbed the old man's arm, keeping him from sliding to the ground. "Master Risal! Speak to me!"  
"I..." Risal took several deep breaths as his senses slowly returned to him fully, and he nodded as he pulled himself to his feet. "I am well. The first half of the ceremony is complete, it would seem."  
"The second half begins with a search for the dark paladin, does it not?" Chiima asked, stepping forward with a scowl on his face.  
Saima considered berating the paladin for breaking his silence and his place before he was called to do so, but relented when Risal addressed him directly.  
"Yes, it would seem so. This is an... unusual manner in which to select an avatar. Not that I've ever attended one of these ceremonies myself before now, but usually they consist of a riddle or elaborate metaphor which refers to the one who would bear the holy object." The old human sighed wearily.

"So... wait... the Eye of Malakai wouldn't work in the hands of any but the avatar, right? Thus ensuring that we don't make a mistake and promote the wrong person..." One of the paladins, encouraged by Chiima's presumptuous actions, stepped forward as well, a curious look on his face.  
"Yes, that's correct. The Eye will accept none but Malakai's chosen," Risal agreed, wondering where he was going with this.  
The paladin nodded. "Right. So couldn't you just hand the Eye around to everybody here, and wait for it to activate or whatever?" He asked, really not wanting to go rushing all over the city in order to get in a fight with one of the most powerful demonic warriors in all the realms.  
Risal considered this for a moment. Then he sweatdropped heavily.  
Saima twitched, and the elven woman stalked straight up to the paladin, and then openly smacked him upside the head, eliciting surprise from the crowd and the surrounding clergy.  
"You know, we didn't spend a week preparing for this thing just so you could suck all the drama out of it in twenty seconds," the bishop hissed, holding the young man by the ear.

As the paladin apologized profusely and begged for mercy, Chiima rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "I and a few of my guard know of this servant of Kharak; he was seen with a human and a dragon child trying to get to the market."  
Saima jerked back in surprise, letting go of her recent victim. "What! What happened? Why didn't you detain him?"  
The angel shook his head. "They did nothing wrong at all, and showed no interest in either the Order's cathedral or our sacred rites. In addition, the demon seemed to be subservient to the human, and held tightly in check. To detain someone merely for associating with a dark cult would be a dear injustice, and a heresy against our faith."  
Saima nodded reluctantly, accepting the reasoning. Risal rose an eyebrow and looked thoughtful.  
"Now, however, the words of our god demand judgment for the Dread Knight. Lord Cardinal, please allow me to bring the blighted soul to justice. I have fought Dread Knights before, and know better than most here the degree of their ferocity and skill."  
The cardinal scratched his head. "Well... actually, the prophecy said that the avatar was the 'one to bring this demon knight to justice', so-"  
"So obviously, the first to slay the foul being will be the avatar!" One of the bishops concluded, rousing the paladins to activity.  
"So, wait, it might not be Chiima?"  
"Who knows? It probably is, but whoever gets him is avatar!"  
"Might as well try, right? It is all preordained..."  
"How tough can a demon knight be?"  
Chiima drew his sword and stamped an armored foot onto the marble tile platform, getting the attention of the Paladin Corps and the assembled clergy.  
"It matters not to me WHO is selected avatar! That one is selected at all is all that matters! For now, our god Malakai demands that these streets be washed with tainted blood! Now, we hunt!"  
With responses that varied from eager cheers to half-hearted mumbling, the Paladin corp, the bishops, and some of the more naive bishops and acolytes all began to file out of the courtyard toward the main gate, intending to see the ceremony through to the end.

Meanwhile, Risal once again took possession of the Eye of Malakai, shaking his head as he witnessed the most sacred rite he'd ever conduct turn into a hunting contest. 'Oh well; no use feeling sorry for the demon, I suppose. Still, I wonder exactly what kind of avatar we'll get out of this?'  
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Let's see, now..." the tiny gnome woman frowned as she looked over the customers gathered in her waiting room, and scratched her head under her pointed cap. "It seems business is booming, today. Who's next?"  
An elven man stood up, followed by several others. "I'm sorry that we're rushing you with orders like this, but we'd like to make a proper offering for the new avatar of Malakai before he's called away from the city by his duties."  
The enchantress frowned, seeing the eager faces of the Church and Sanctuary priests. Each of the Divine Circles had their own enchanters among their clergy, but no doubt they had their hands full with orders from the bishops and high priests.  
"Well, it's good for business, sure, but I'm afraid if you each of you want more than a light spell affixed to an item, it will literally take all day."  
They seemed about to accept that proposition, but the only other customer in the shop, a young human carrying a dragon on his shoulder, suddenly sprang to his feet.  
"Uh, hey! Can you take care of me, first? I'm kinda in a hurry, and all I want is an identification, if possible." Ranma said, weathering the glares of the assembled holy men and women who were ahead of him.  
The gnome rubbed her chin, considering it. Then she nodded. An ID meant quick, easy money, and it didn't seem like the human would be willing to wait until tomorrow.  
"Very well. That will be five gold, please," the gnome asked, ignoring the mumbled complaints from the priests.  
Ranma rummaged around in his pocket, and dropped the money in her hand. Then he followed her past the curtain that separated her main office from the waiting room.

"Here. This's the item I need identified..." Ranma slipped the guantlet off his hand and placed it on the enchantress's desk.  
The gnome picked it up, nodding as she looked it over.  
"Hmmm... the material is... strange. It doesn't seem like metal, but its firmness..."  
Ranma crossed his arms over his chest. "Far as I can tell, it's indestructible; it's taken hits from enchanted blades, axes, and force-emitting spells. It also seems to absorb ki somewhat."  
"Let's not forget the safety features; thing won't come off unless you take it off," K murmured.  
"Hm. Yes, yes. Let's begin." Drawing a circle on the table with her finger, the gnome woman created the framework for an identifying enchantment before placing the glove on top of it.  
Then she raised her palms to the glove, mumbled a few words that even K couldn't understand, and waited as a number of white lines appeared in mid-air above the item, drawing another spell complex around it.  
Ranma waiting patiently as the spell did its work, idly glancing toward the office door and hoping that Rayden had followed his instructions and stayed out of trouble. He didn't have much hope.  
"Hmmmm..." The enchantress frowned deeply, and her left eyebrow twitched as her spell patterns suddenly broke apart into small pinnacles of light.  
Ranma blinked as the lights slowly sank toward the glove, and then were suddenly sucked into the gem set in the back of the hand. The gem glowed for a moment, then dulled once again.  
"Huh? What wazzat?" Ranma said uncomfortably.  
"Your gauntlet absorbed my identification spell," the gnome said bitterly, furrowing her brow. "By observing its absorption, I could divine some things about the item, but..." she sighed. "I'm afraid an actual identification is beyond me. What I can tell you is that it can absorb magic as well as... what did you call it? Ki? Also, it is not sentient, or cursed in any way that I'm familiar with."  
Ranma groaned. "You can't tell me what it's supposed to do or anything, though?"  
The enchantress shook her head. "I'm afraid not. I'd guess that it was made of some sort of magic-nullifying metal, except that none of those are close to 'invincible,' as you claim it is, and I would have gotten a different response from my spell. I don't know where it's from, its full capabilities, its materials, how old it is, or what it was made for." Then she pursed her lips. "Though I'd have to guess that it was developed for combat purposes. Most things of this type are."  
"Well, drat. Can I get a refund, then?" Ranma asked, crossing his arms over his chest. Magical services were not known for being particularly customer-oriented, but as he was buying it with Rayden's money, he felt that he at least had to try.  
The gnome frowned at him, then shrugged. "Sure, I guess. Unless there's a different item you'd like to have identified..."  
Ranma started to shake his head and hold out his hand, when a thought struck him, and he hesitated.  
The small woman raised an eyebrow at seeing her customer caught in a moment of indecision. It seemed that this fellow made it a habit to walk about town with magical gear of unknown design and purpose. Not really the brightest thing to do, and besides that, it made the enchantress quite suspicious of where he had produced the mysterious equipment.  
Finally, the pigtailed Ninja nodded and reached into his backpack, slowly unsheathed his rusty-looking katana, and then dropped it on the table.  
"What the? How'd you get that back?" K asked in surprise.  
Ranma smirked. He hadn't been lying when he told the guards that he had given them all his weapons, but it was child's play to snatch back his sword on the way out. Taking things without being noticed wasn't his favorite skill to use, and he did want to adhere to local law, but he wasn't so stupid as to take Rayden into a holy city without being prepared to fight his way out. Besides, it wasn't really stealing, since the weapon was his to begin with.  
"Okay, how about this one?"  
The gnome nodded slowly, not bothering to ask how a traveler had gotten into the city armed; it was none of her business, so long as he didn't use it in her shop. "I see... this blade has a whopper of enchantment on it."  
Ranma blinked. "How can you tell just from looking? Is it the runes in the side?"  
"No, it's the way it didn't shatter into a dozen pieces from falling three inches onto the table." She scraped a bit of dirt off the flat of the blade with her fingernail. "This is quite a sword. I imagine simply drawing it would make most opponents withdraw out of pity."  
Ranma sweatdropped, remembering Rayden's reaction once he unleashed the blade in combat. "Yeah, well, it does pretty good for itself anyway."  
"I see. Very well, now stand back." The enchantress raised her arms, and once again the spell circle appeared, slowly rotating around the tarnished katana in an ever-quickening, ever-brightening dance of light.  
Slowly, the katana began to glow.  
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Rayden glared across the street at the angelic couple that kept glancing at him, causing the two winged civilians to wince and scurry away, whispering to each other in panicked tones.  
He snorted. No doubt they'd inform the nearest templar or city guard. With any luck it would be one of the eight who had already come and questioned him, but he wasn't holding his breath; it was all he could do not to grab one of the fools' heads and crush it within his grip when the cretins began describing how trouble-making demonic filth were treated in holy cities.  
However, he had told Ranma he wouldn't start any fights. Meaning that until someone took a swing at him, he wasn't allowed to punch anybody's face in, even if he stopped short of killing them.  
'For such a powerful guy, he sure has a weak stomach for killing,' the demon knight mused. 'Then again, I've committed a few acts of mercy myself. And the kid's got it where it counts.'  
He glared at an elf who looked to be working up the nerve to approach him, and watched the pointy-eared man flinch and scurry away. Besides the guard, it seemed that everyone in the whole blasted city could sense his demonic nature; in most places, people assumed he was human just from appearance. In this town, however, the holy magic that hung over the many temples and arched between the three great cathedrals made his dark aura stand out like a black bear among sheep.  
Their curiosity as to his presence was well-founded, he had to admit; everything about the city repulsed him. Even the air itself seemed to be making him sick and slightly dizzy. He wondered how the demonic harlocks withstood it, and even secured membership in the Divine Circles, with this level of holy magic eating away at demonic auras.  
'Then again, a harlock isn't much of a demon,' he admitted. 'They're like the demonic version of evon; you never know where you'll find one.'  
"Hey, Mister!"  
Rayden blinked, and then looked down at his side to see a small evon child staring up at him curiously.  
'Speaking of which...' "What's up?"  
The evon child continued staring for a moment, then cocked his head to one side. "Why do you make that angry face at people who look at you?"  
The Dread Knight sweatdropped. "Because I'm a demon, and that's the most violent and evil act I'm currently allowed to commit right now. At least while they're that far away."  
The child stared for a moment. "What's a 'dee-man'?"  
Sighing, Rayden kneeled down and then patted the young evon on the head, causing tense, panicked whispers among all the current observers.  
"A demon is like a monster, but slightly smarter. We're big, strong creatures who are only happy when indulging in sin, or witnessing the pain of others. We're what you call 'evil'."  
The boy cocked his head to the other side. "Evil? What's that?"  
'Boy, did this kid's parents fail him, or what?' "Evil is something that hurts someone else when it's not necessary to do so. For example..."  
Rayden turned quickly and stuck his leg out in a powerful sweeping kick, striking an unwary adult evon in the shins and sending him flying into a spectacular faceplant.

Kaze let out a pathetic yelp as someone suddenly swept his feet out from under him, and time seemed to slow down as his legs were forced out of contact with the ground, moving him nearly parallel to the ground as the package he was carrying left his arms.  
Of course, for him time WAS slowing down as the enhanced awareness granted by his psychic abilities kicked in and allowed him time to salvage the situation beyond the point at which his reflexes had already failed him.  
Deciding, regrettably, that his parcel took priority over the humiliating and inevitably painful impact of his face on the pavement, Kaze used the final moment before touchdown to thrust his hand out toward the falling wooden case and exert enough telekinetic energy to ensure that it settled harmlessly on the ground, rather than than leaving its fragile contents to the tender mercy of gravity.  
_Tunk_ Went the case, its contents jingling slightly once the two-inch cushion of supernatural force between it and the ground vanished.  
_Thud!_ Went Kaze, his snow-white hair spilling all over in a broad fan as his assailant busted out laughing.

"Ha ha ha! What a sucker!" Rayden said gleefully, feeling some of his queasiness evaporate at the sight of someone else's pain.  
The evon boy frowned. "Hey Mister, that wasn't very nice."  
Rayden nodded, smiling as he looked down at the child. "Right! That's evil. It's not nice at all. Fun, though."  
Then he turned toward the older evon, who was stumbling to his feet. "Hey buddy! Have a nice trip? Ha!"  
Kaze turned toward the voice, beholding a large, muscular man in a long coat who was laughing while a perturbed-looking evon child scampered away. He glared.  
"And just who do you think you are, tripping random people as they walk by?" The priest growled, stepping up before his assailant.  
Rayden raised an eyebrow, then pointed to the crest on his coat.  
Kaze glanced at it, then reasserted eye contact. "So you're a member of the Third Brotherhood! That doesn't mean that you can go..."  
The evon trailed off suddenly as the full ramifications of the crest struck him like a sledgehammer.  
"Wh-Wh-What? How? You mean-" Kaze gaped at the man as he realized, for the first time, that he had a powerful, unmistakably tainted aura about him. In fact, he kicked himself for not noticing him the moment he had turned onto the street; the dark magic was like a crude oil spill in the middle of a crystalline lake.  
"Hold on, please! Just a moment!" Kaze asked suddenly, his expression serious. Then he turned and picked up the wooden box he had been carrying, checking it first to ensure that none of its contents had been broken. He had been sent to purchase supplies for the cathedral's master alchemist before the Avatar's ceremony had begun, adding another two hour task to the already formidable workload he had been assigned as punishment. He had been fuming angrily about it ever since he left the cathedral, and twice as much on his way back, which was the only excuse he had for not noticing the demonic being in front of him immediately.  
Rayden frowned as the evon, who looked to be a priest from his robes marked with the crest of Malakai, returned to him, his expression neither haughty, angry, or fearful. What did this guy want?  
"Sorry about that. I'm on a bit of errand is all," Kaze explained, looking perfectly pleasant.  
Rayden blinked. "I tripped you for no reason, and you're apologizing to me?"  
"Pff! Oh, forget that! Everyone has a right to certain childish diversions, I won't begrudge you yours! No harm done, you see?"  
The Dread Knight twitched, unable to see where this was going.  
Kaze scanned Rayden up and down, rubbing his chin with his free hand while he took in every aspect of Rayden's appearance. "Hmmmm... you know, I've never seen a member of the Dark Brotherhoods in person before... most fascinating..." He circled around Rayden, who by now was looking quite nervous about the evon's behavior. "Are you a member of the ecclesiarchy? Or a member of the military branch?"  
"Uh... both, technically," Rayden mumbled in confusion.  
"Splendid! Are you a full Dread Knight, then? And where are your weapons? Oh, of course! You were disarmed at the gate, weren't you? Hmmm..."  
'Is this guy crazy?' Rayden thought to himself. Although it wasn't the first time someone had shown an interest in him as a dark paladin, it was the last thing he expected from a priest of Malakai. Especially one that he had already assaulted.  
"By the way, my name is Kaze Toren! Priest of the second rank of the Order of Malakai!" The evon said pleasantly, holding out his hand to shake.  
Rayden took his hand and shook it numbly, not knowing what else to do. "Uh... Rayden Shikodan. Dread Knight and... well, for the moment, I'm just a Dread Knight."  
Kaze rubbed his chin thoughtfully, and then realized that the pedestrians all had their eyes locked on Rayden, and as consequence, him as well. "Say, would you care for a drink? I find myself wondering what a demon knight is doing in Taer'Kul, and it would be better to hear the story sitting down inside, don't you think?"  
Rayden twitched again. "Uh... I'm kinda waiting for my friend here..."  
"O-ho! And who would this friend be? Another Dread Knight? Oh! I know, a priest!" Kaze rubbed his hands together in anticipation. "Kharak's chosen are said to be among the finest cadres of demonic warriors outside of the Slayer's Guild! You must have been on all sorts of famous campaigns! Is your friend of equal rank?"  
Rayden slowly stepped back, feeling a type of nervous uncertainty. "My friend isn't with the Third. He's just some human guy."  
Kaze blinked in surprise. "So, wait, you're not here with a convoy?"  
"How would a Brotherhood convoy get into Taer'Kul?" Rayden asked incredulously. "You barely have the nerve to let one unarmed dark paladin in here; I'm pretty sure the 'freedom of entry' laws have their limits!"  
"Yes, yes, speaking of which, are you just following your friend? How did you come to be here?" Kaze asked curiously, walking over to a crate, sitting on it, and generally giving the impression that he wasn't going to leave the Dread Knight alone for quite some time.  
"Whoa, wait, hold it! Why aren't you all suspicious?" Rayden said accusingly, pointing at the evon. "A demon cultist in the middle of your holy city with a story as flimsy as 'I'm following a friend,' and you're not giving me so much as a stuffy lecture? What kind of Divine priest are you?"  
Kaze looked surprised by the outburst, but then nodded slowly. "Yes, I suppose it does seem strange. You see, in regards to faith I've simply taken to heart the tenet 'freedom of religion'. Ultimately you have the right to adopt whatever system of faith you wish, and I have no right to either question your membership to that faith, nor judge you as a person based only on your religious preference."  
Rayden stared for a moment, then shook his head. "Okay... and the fact that I'm a demon?"  
The priest shrugged. "Oh, so what? I can't even tell what kind of demon you are."  
"What about how I tripped you?"  
"I've no proof that it wasn't an accident."  
"It wasn't an accident. I just wanted to see you humiliated."  
"Well, that's a perfectly reasonable explanation if you ask me."  
Rayden scratched his head. 'There's something really odd about this guy... not really in a bad way, but still... what kind of a holy priest gets all excited at meeting a Dark Paladin?'  
He was about to question the evon further, when he noticed a great deal of commotion coming from further down the street, and turned to see what the trouble was.  
Rayden frowned at the sight of a virtual wall of gleaming white and silver armor marching forward, some of them with weapons drawn. "Now what?"

Kaze too looked suspiciously at the approaching mob. "I've no idea. That's the Order's paladin corps... and the bishops? They should be at the ceremony!" He stood up, frowning deeply. "Something is very wrong here..."  
The mob approached in relative silence; though many paladins were understandably excited about finding their prey so quickly, they all inevitably ended up following Chiima's example as the paladin commander stoically approached with his weapon sheathed and his mouth closed in a determined frown.  
As if to underline his importance in the exercise, the angel thrust an arm to the side and halted, causing the rest of the Order's members to stop in their tracks as well.  
Rayden simply raised an eyebrow. "What's up, wings? Am I not supposed to be out in public without a leash or something?" The demon knight recognized a lynch mob when he saw one; the fact that the group approached in a disciplined, military fashion only managed to fool the citizens brave enough to stay and watch the encounter.  
_Shing! Vwoosh!_ In a lightning-quick motion, Chiima drew his longsword from its sheath in a wide, horizontal arc, launching a yellow energy wave that sliced through the air as quickly as the blade it originated from.  
_Bwack!_ Grunting in pain, Rayden failed to make any kind of dodge as the energy wave cut into him, throwing him onto his back and sending a thin trail of blood splattering over the width of the street.  
Kaze jumped to his feet, looking alarmed. "Wh-What's going on here? Is this man a criminal?"  
Chiima regarded his friend for a moment, and then disregarded him just as quickly as he pointed his enchanted longsword at the struggling demon knight. "Dread Knight! Know that your death has been called for! By our god, Malakai, Ancient of Justice and Lord of Judgment, our holy blades shall taste your tainted blood, and our white fire shall cleanse you from this place! Judgment has been passed! Defend yourself, pawn of Kharak!"  
At some unspoken signal, the rest of the paladin corps drew their swords while the priests behind them started to chant while pressing their hands together.  
Rayden calmly pushed himself to his feet, lightly brushing off the thin wound across his chest. "All right, then. First blood's yours. That makes this self-defense." He balled his hands into fists. "We gonna do this, chicken-boy? Bring it!"  
"Hold it! Hold it!" Kaze suddenly shouted, looking quite upset and moving to stand in front of Rayden. "Paladin Chiima! I demand to know the charges by which you've sentenced this man to execution!"  
The angel blinked. "Charges? We don't need charges."  
Kaze twitched, and a vein popped up on his head. "'Don't need charges'? That's the most ludicrous thing I've ever heard! You mean to say you've convicted this man and sentenced him to death for no reason at all!"  
Chiima twitched himself. "His destruction was foreseen by the prophecy of Cardinal Risal! Malakai demands that the DEMON be slain!" He shouted back, putting particular emphasis on the word "demon".  
"This defies logic AND scripture! It's blasphemy and injustice of the highest degree!" Kaze complained. "Malakai does not simply hand out baseless death warrants through his vessels! This entire fiasco shows a blatant disregard for common law and our church's values!"  
"Oh, how would you know?" Saima, who had taken up position along the flank of the mob in front of Risal spoke up angrily. "You only attend a third of your classes anyway!"

Rayden, for his part, twitched angrily as he watched the impending fight disintegrate into a shouting match between the men who had come to kill him and the evon he had just met. This jerk was ruining everything!  
Of course, a small part of Rayden's brain helpfully reminded him that he was outnumbered forty-to-one, and that one of the opponents seemed to be a very well-armed angelic paladin of significant experience and skill. A different, even smaller part protested the idea of fighting while suffering from Taer'Kul's magic fields, and yet another piece brought up Ranma's request to stay out of trouble, and how the evon priest was trying to help him do just that.

"Joke all you like, but this is a shameful sight!" Kaze yelled, gesturing to the crowd. "None of you has a single crime to blame this man for, and yet here you are to assault him en masse! An unarmed man, yet, who has obeyed our laws to the letter, and been harassed constantly for his trouble, all because of his demonic nature and choice of religious practice! Qualities which, I remind you, leave him even MORE helpless at the mercy of the holy magic that constantly permeates our city! He probably couldn't summon enough mana to light a candle! And you call on him to defend himself?"  
The priests and paladins began to look less determined and less sure of themselves, and started to glance around at their fellow warriors, attempting to judge their reactions to the speech.  
"B-But... the prophecy-" Chiima stuttered, feeling quite uncomfortable as Kaze's words rang true.  
"Prophecies are flimsy accounts upon which to doom a man; history has shown that time and time again," Kaze said flippantly. "If the prophecy is true, then it will occur no matter what course of action you take. If it doesn't, then it was a dud, or it was misinterpreted. Fate does not need your help."  
On the sidelines, Cardinal Risal began to rub his chin thoughtfully as he watched the scene unfold before him.

At last, the parts of Rayden's mind that were opposed to immediate violence were silenced as the demon knight decided on a course of action to get back to the business of busting heads.  
It wasn't that he wanted to see anyone here dead, or that he wanted to risk death himself (at the moment, that risk was very significant indeed), or even that he didn't have the common sense to recognize a fight he couldn't win. Fighting a battle that one could otherwise avoid through negotiation and understanding was simply one of the fundamental teachings of his own religion, just as legal conviction and sentencing was a part of Kaze's. That said, he needed a way to rouse the crowd to action against him again, but in such a way that it would still count as self-defense in Ranma's eyes.  
_Shove!_

Nearly the entire Order membership blinked in tandem as they witnessed the Dread Knight walk up behind Kaze and push him forward onto his face, seemingly for no reason at all.  
_Thud!_ "Ow! Would you stop knocking me down?" Kaze said irritably, slowly getting up.  
The assembled paladins and bishops spent a moment in silence to take stock of the situation.  
"Hey! He assaulted Priest Toren!"  
"Is he injured? He looks sort of injured!"  
"That's a crime, isn't it?"  
"Close enough!"  
"Toren was trying to help him!"  
"Ungrateful bastard!"  
"Get the blackheart!"  
Kaze blinked as he got up to a crouch, then panicked once he saw the situation spiral out of control. "W-Wait! Don't just-GAH!" he dove out of the way as two paladin acolytes charged forward ahead of Chiima, their spears thrusting forward.

'Amateurs,' Rayden thought smugly as the two young warriors charged him, unleashing their attacks far too early in their attacking run to either catch their target by surprise or maximize the strength of their attack.  
Rayden drove forward himself, surprising the two novices, who each failed to correct their accuracy in time. Grabbing hold of one spear with his left hand, he then slugged the other spear's owner with a right hook that sent him sprawling across the street from the force. Then he wrenched the spear out of the first acolyte's hands and kicked the man away, sending him reeling into a few of his allies who had just begun to break from the mob.  
"Ha! 'Aint unarmed anymore, chumps! Come get some!" The Dread Knight taunted, grinning as he spun the weapon around a few times for the purposes of showmanship.  
"Die, demon spawn!" One of the full paladins shouted, charging forward herself with her greatsword at the ready.

Chiima watched pensively as the men and women under his command began to move forward in a slowly crumbling wave, charging recklessly and trying to face off against their demonic counterpart.  
This was bad, and he knew it; not only had Kaze's speech eroded their conviction with doubt, and in fact dispelled his zeal entirely, but the less experienced acolytes were crowding in alongside the fully trained paladins. Although the Knights of Judgment were trained to battle stronger foes in twos and threes, the fledgling warriors provided little help, and in some cases made things more difficult with their presence. To make matters worse, the mob mentality that suddenly dominated the crowd replaced any sense of leadership, and with it, dispelled their tactical advantage. Glancing to the side, Chiima could see the bishops and priests curse and halt their attack spells, suddenly having several friendly targets in the way that should have waited until after the first volley.  
'But... should I rally my men, or call off the attack on the Dread Knight?' The angel wondered. The right commands and a few words of encouragement could easily crush the demon, who was taking full advantage of their disarray. On the other hand, Kaze was right; this assault was unfounded and unjust. But trying to withdraw might only cause more confusion, and confusion could mean casualties. Weren't the lives of his paladins more important than the rights of some random demonic warrior?  
'Urgh! This is madness! What am I supposed to-huh?'  
The angel's eyes widened as an elf barrelled through the crowd that still stood before him and the Dread Knight, and not under his own power. Men and women scattered and fell from the improvised projectile, and Chiima himself barely dodged out of the way in time as the poor man skidded atop the pavement, sparks jumping off of his plate mail.  
'Hmmm... maybe I should have caught him instead,' the paladin thought regretfully, berating himself for being caught off-guard.  
"Lord Chiima! Above!"  
"What? What in-"

Rayden grimaced as the sky before him lit up in a dozen white bursts of flame as several priests that were waiting for an opening released arrows of light right into the path of his jump.  
Pushing the pain aside, he landed unsteadily on his feet, growling as he heard several of the priests and a few of the paladins shout incantations around him, now that he was no longer crowded in by several of their own.  
"Graaugh!" Electricity and flame curled around him as lances of energy converged from all sides, and then his body seemed to tighten and slow down as a spell circle appeared beneath him and rotated, casting a bright white light upward as it weakened Rayden's aura even further, and wound yellow ribbons of magic around his legs.  
"DIE, MONSTER!" A human acolyte shouted, rushing the stunned demon and stabbing his longsword into Rayden's back. Immediately he winced and tried to get away, realizing that he had only gotten two inches of penetration, and that his "victim" was already reaching for him.  
Grabbing the acolyte by the arm, Rayden pulled him in and, having had paramount success in using the holy warriors as makeshift projectiles so far, threw him headlong into the bishops and priests, who were crowded together on the street while they lent battlefield support.  
For some reason most of the ecclesiarchy decided to stand their ground instead of dodge out of the way, and Rayden turned away as the hapless trainee impacted painfully upon a magic shield. It didn't matter; all he needed was a moment of distraction from the magic users...

Chiima ground his teeth as a halo of soft, black energy appeared around the Dread Knight, dispelling the bonds of light that held him during the brief respite he had against the priests' magic assault.  
Then, to the angel's shock, the demonic warrior pulled out the sword lodged in his back and swung it two-handed as he rushed toward him (the spear had apparently been destroyed or dropped early in the fierce melee).  
_Clang!_ After parrying the first attack, Chiima slashed at his opponent's arm, deciding that the best way to resolve this mess was to disable the demon without killing him, and mediate an apology later (assuming they could find no good excuse for attacking him).  
To his surprise, the demon knight grabbed his sword and stopped it in mid-swing, unmindful even as blood burst from his hand.  
Grinning savagely, Rayden swung his sword around in a neck-level slash.  
_Chingk!_ In response, Chiima ducked the slash and pulled his blade from Rayden's grasp, drawing more blood from the demon's hand. Building on that momentum, he twisted into a low slash at his opponent's shins.  
_Whok!_ Instead of slicing clean through, as expected, or at least disabling the limb and causing the Dread Knight to surrender, as hoped, the holy longsword lodged itself sidelong in Rayden's calf, being accompanied by another spray of blood, and nothing more than an angry snarl from Rayden himself. Only too late did Chiima realize that he was still striking with the level of force reserved for fighting normal human or humanoid creatures of Rayden's size, and by the time he had collected enough of his wits to regret it, he had received a punishing right hook to his shoulder that crushed his armor pauldron like a soda can.  
Finally deciding that he wasn't going to win a battle of skill while surrounded, wounded, and weakened, Rayden reached down for the sword in his leg, but this time grabbed hold of Chiima's arm instead of the weapon.  
"DIE, ANGEL SCUM!" Tossing away the longsword, Rayden tumbled right into the winged paladin, and pressed his palm flat upon the angel's breastplate as both paladins fell onto the ground in a struggling heap.  
"SRAASH!" Shouting a short incantation as his hand suddenly lit ablaze with black flame, Rayden forced as much magical power as he could manage down his arm, intending to annihilate his foe with a single blast.  
_Bzrt!_ Chiima winced slightly as a small arc of dark lightning appeared around Rayden's hand, being easily conducted through the enchanted steel of his armor. Then he reared back a fist to retaliate.  
_Thwock!_ Rayden's head snapped to the side as he took a surprisingly powerful hammer fist to the jaw, and he bit back a curse, having forgotten that his demonic powers beyond superhuman strength and resilience were useless beneath the mercy of Taer'Kul's holy magic.  
"Get your hands off me, shadow-born filth!"  
"Not until I squeeze the last drop of life out of your neck, harpy!"

Kaze desperately pushed aside the cheering and shouting acolytes as he shoved his way to the heart of the battle, having heard several attacks and a few explosions from the area where Rayden's jump had landed.  
Upon shoving aside the last human paladin that stood between him and the wrestling match on the ground, he was immediately halted by Saima, who was working with the other bishops in attempting to keep the rowdy paladins and trainees from rushing into dogpile that could have caused more damage to their forces.  
"Toren! Stay back! Chiima will finish him soon. Your help is not needed," the elven woman said as Kaze tried to protest.  
"I'm not trying to-"  
"Stay out of this, Toren," the bishop warned, her eyes narrowing. "You had your moment in the spotlight, but your... 'friend' decided to cause trouble. This result was entirely foreseeable; he has no one to blame but himself."  
Kaze grit his teeth as the blonde woman held her arms out to bar his passage. "All that may be true, but I refuse to let your actions be swept aside by such a simple excuse! Demon or not-"  
"MY actions are to be judged by my superiors, PRIEST," Saima growled, glowing slightly as she summoned her aura. "Now step aside!"  
Kaze shut his mouth, and the cheers of the crowd seemed to close in around him, engulfing him; a sadistic tempo punctuated on every beat by the sounds of flesh and steel impacting each other with terrifying consistency.  
To his right, bishops chanted spells to weaken the demonic knight further, and lend strength to their champion.  
To his left, Cardinal Risal shook his head sadly at the scenario, and gazed down at the crystal sphere in his hands in regret.  
"No. I judge you, bishop, and you are wanting," the evon said softly, such that the shocked elf could barely hear him among the din of the mob. "Now YOU step aside."  
_Pap!_ Before Saima could mutter a word in return, Kaze had summoned a paper talisman to his hand, and slapped it onto her abdomen.  
"This might sting for a moment. You'll be fine." The priest mumbled, snapping his fingers.  
_Thoom!_ A punishing wave of force blew the bishop off of her feet, and sent her sprawling into another of her rank as Kaze moved forward, ignoring the stunned expressions of his fellow Order devotees.  
"That's quite enough!" Kaze shouted, withdrawing a single vial of clear fluid from beneath his robes and holding it in the air. A bright light engulfed the container, and Kaze mumbled a quick enchantment as he threw it at the wrestling paladins, who had ignored his voice.  
_Crack!_ The vial exploded upon touching Rayden's back, and a white ring expanded quickly to a diameter of two meters as the liquid inside splashed over the demon's head and fell onto Chiima's dented chest torso armor.  
Both combatants stopped fighting, and blinked in surprise.

Kaze looked pleased at first when the brawl halted, but then raised an eyebrow. "Odd... I thought sleeping catalysts were supposed to turn into a gas upon use..." while he had an effective sleep spell that required no components, using a catalyst allowed the spell to affect and area, and decreased the chances of its effects being nullified (which was a definite concern with paladins). As such he had quickly "borrowed" one of the solutions that he had been sent to purchase and put it to use.  
"Uh... well..." one of the other priests scratched the back of his head. "Aren't spell catalysts usually blue?"  
"You know, I think you're right..." Kaze mumbled, wondering what he had thrown if he had grabbed the wrong substance.  
At that moment, Saima shoved a paladin out of her way as she stomped toward Kaze. "Toren, you bastard! How dare yo-"  
"Not now, please. I'm busy," the evon muttered, snapping his fingers to the side.  
Undeterred, the elven bishop ran forward to clobber the upstart priest, and in her anger, was quite surprised when she smacked into a magical force wall that she probably would have otherwise noticed.  
Nobody was paying attention to her plight, however. Those assembled were far more interested in whatever possible reason the demon knight had for suddenly screaming in complete agony.

"Gbaaaugh! Ghb! Fraah!" Rayden thrashed about painfully as he scampered away from Chiima, clawing at his face pathetically as he kept his eyes squeezed shut.  
The winged paladin remained seated in shock, completely confused. One moment he was being nearly pulverized by the Dread Knight, despite the various wounds and magic spells weakening the demon, and the next he was shouting tortured screams as he writhed about by himself, having apparently forgotten about the battle he was in amidst his pain.  
"I... I'm somewhat confused as to what I'm seeing," the paladin mumbled, taking a moment to massage his bleeding head even as a nearby bishop came to heal him. 'This creature has dozens of stab wounds, several impact burns, and I must have broken his jaw into pieces... what was that liquid?'  
As the bishop laid his hands upon him and chanted the healing spell, Chiima looked down and found a large shard of the vial that had a partially-torn label still attached to it.  
"What? Holy water? You threw holy water at us?" The paladin said, causing several in the crowd to sweatdrop.  
"Uh... well... not on **purpose**," Kaze mumbled, rubbing his chin. Then he shrugged. 'A very unusual reaction... I thought holy water only worked on undead. Oh well, have to work with it now.' "Never mind that! Show's over! This mob is officially disbanded!"  
"Who died and made you king!" Saima shouted, rubbing her nose angrily as she debated whether to actually attack the priest in earnest.  
"'King' isn't actually a rank in our order, but be that as it may, that would be Yaaralam."

Eyes grew wide as the crowd's attention turned toward Cardinal Risal.  
"Tell me your name, priest of Malakai," the cardinal requested, stepping forward while gesturing for Saima to stand back.  
Kaze blinked, and pointed to himself questioningly. "Me? My name is Kaze Toren, priest of the second rank." Then his eyes hardened. "If I'm to be punished for obstructing this... questionable act of justice, or for assaulting Bishop Saima, then so be it. But I make no apologies."  
The cardinal chuckled. "Relax, Toren. By the power of our god Malakai, Lord of Judgment, you have been called upon to take up the Eye of Malakai, and serve the Order as its new fourth avatar."  
_Crash!_ Several people fell flat on their faces at the pronouncement, and Saima gaped as she started to tremble.  
"What? Me? Nah, couldn't be." Kaze pointed to Chiima. "Chiima is going to be the next avatar. Guy's tough as nails. You don't think anybody else could have faced off against that Dread Knight, do you?"  
"Putting aside the fact that you effectively disabled the Dread Knight yourself," Risal began, looking quite bemused, "I'm afraid Paladin Chiima is not going to be an avatar anytime soon. It is you."  
"That's ridiculous." Kaze gestured to the men and women around him. "Look, any one of these people can tell you that I'm just not avatar material. Some would claim I'm not even trainee priest material."  
"YES! YES! THAT'S COMPLETELY TRUE!" Saima shouted desperately. "It can't be him! He's a lazy, immoral idiot!"  
"And yet, it took a lazy, immoral idiot to bring the demon to justice," Risal said, shrugging.  
"That was an accident! I was trying to stop the fight!" Kaze protested, looking around in a panic and hoping others would throw in a few words along with Saima (though hopefully they would be a little more tactful).  
"Well, yes. That's precisely it," the cardinal admitted. "While all these others sought to destroy the demon for no cause other than the wording of a prophecy, you alone protested to his rights and demanded that he be charged and tried properly. I obviously don't know you, and I can't say whether you're an idiot or not, but having grasped such a simple and basic concept of our teachings when it eluded so many others deserves proper recognition." The old man smiled. "You brought the Dread Knight to justice, or perhaps brought justice to the Dread Knight. Either way, the prophecy is clear."  
"Impossible! Such incompetence-" Saima began, only to be silenced by Risal's interruption.  
"Is irrelevant in this matter. For better or for worse, our avatars are selected by prophecy, not merit. We accept that in judging those best fit to carry out his word, no one may supercede our lord Malakai. We accept that this means any member of the Order may become his champion, from the mightiest apostle, to a novice monk. This matter has been decided, and this ceremony requires but one more component." Then he grinned, and tossed the crystal sphere in his hands at the startled evon. "Catch."

Chiima averted his eyes as the holy artifact glowed brightly upon contact with Kaze's hands, and then as he squeezed his eyes shut, he pressed his hands together to pray.  
'By my god, the Lord of Judgment, may I be forgiven for my error today. For my sin of prejudice a... possibly innocent man was hurt and nearly killed.' Taking a deep breath, he mumbled a quick litany. 'Thank you for showing me your light through your new vessel. Please, bless Toren and care for him. Show him the way, and protect him. For he is young, and your struggle immense. Ahmen.'  
Then the angel turned to the bishop, whose hands were finally dimming as his healing spell exhausted itself. "Bishop, please tend to the demon as well. It's... inadequate apology, but for now it's the least we can do."  
"Oh, uh..." the elderly angel looked surprised, but nodded and turned around. "Okay, then... so... where'd he go, anyway?"  
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Fifteen minutes, Ray," Ranma mumbled, dragging the groaning demon knight along the ground as he reached the end of a city alleyway. "Fifteen minutes. That's how long I was in there getting my katana identified. And when I get back, you're lying on the ground, writhing in agony, surrounded by a small army of priests and paladins."  
Rayden twitched, still rubbing his eyes fiercely. "Wha'n ma fohl! 'Ey 'tack firs'! Gaah! Eyes burn'g!"  
Ranma frowned as K raised an eyebrow.  
"Uh, hey. Don't you think we should do something? He looks like he's in really bad shape."  
Ranma nodded reluctantly, noting the trail of blood that marked their path into the alley. "Yeah... though if you ask me, Ray's got enough blood in him for four people." Then he leaned down in front of the struggling Dread Knight. "What's wrong? Did someone get a slash in on your eyes? Here, move your hands..."  
Despite Rayden's mumbling, Ranma pried his hands away so that he could get a good look at the demon's face.  
"Huh... that's no cut..." to be honest, the pigtailed warrior didn't know what to make of it. Rayden's face was a bright red, and looked horribly swollen and disfigured. His eyes were puffy and bloodshot, and there were tiny spots of darker red all over him.  
"Holy... wa'er..." Rayden mumbled, pointing to his eyes. "Wa'er in eyes... hur's! Ah cat see!"  
Ranma frowned, then stood up. "Okay, just wait here, all right? I'll see if I can find a healer or something."

Once Ranma had sprinted away, K took a closer look at the pitiful-looking demon knight.  
"Man, that's ugly... well... no uglier than that huge cut in your leg, I guess. But still..." Then he cocked his head to the side. "Did you get stung by a bee? No, wait... a bee couldn't pierce your skin, huh?"  
"Holy wa'er!" Rayden mumbled more loudly. "'E goh holy wa'er in ma eyes!"  
"So? Holy water only works on undead," K said matter-of-factly.  
"Nuh uh! Hur's me! I geh all ishy, and puff a' up!" Rayden was putting more effort into talking now, and his eyes flickered slightly as he tried to utilize sight once again.  
K sweatdropped. "You're... allergic to holy water?"  
"'As da word! A'ergic! Yeah!" Rayden said, scooting himself over so that he could sit back against the wall of the alley.  
"So cuts don't bother you, severe burns barely irritate you, being impaled just slows you down, but your allergies totally disable you?" K mumbled in disbelief.  
Rayden nodded sadly. "I's ge'n be'er now. I can-"  
"Ray! Ray! I've got it!" Ranma shouted, dashing back into the alley.  
"Eh? Ya goh wha?" Rayden turned toward the pigtailed wanderer groggily.  
_Splash!_  
Ranma grinned as he pointed to now-empty flask of holy water in his hand. "I didn't think I'd be able to find some so quickly, but I found this vendor just down the street, so I... uh..."  
"GWAAAAAH! MRRGH! GLBPTHD! I' BURNS!"  
Ranma sweatdropped. "NOW what's his problem?"  
"You're the problem!" K shouted. "Why'd you splash holy water in his face?"  
"He said he needed holy water to wash out his eyes!"  
"No, he said he GOT holy water in his eyes!"  
"But... I thought that only hurt the undead..."  
"We've already been through this!"  
"No we haven't!"  
"AAAAAAARGH! HUR'S SUH MUSH! GYAAAAAAAAAH!"  
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Sssso you don't know anything about thissss human? Are you ssssure?" The gigantic serpent's eyes narrowed at the tiny, four-armed man below, his long, forked tongue flicking about his lips.  
Doppler sighed and massaged his forehead with one of his hands. All around him, humans and humanoids were screaming and running away from the half-dozen splintered wrecks that used to be houses. 'Who sends a DRAGON on a manhunt? Does Greken really have so many of these overgrown lizards that he can afford to have them marauding across the countryside searching for a single human who's incredibly adept at stealth?'  
"Of COURSE I'm sure. I would have noticed the presence of any dragon, whether or not they blew up helpless, unoffending structures to get my attention. Is that all?"  
The earth dragon hissed. "Do not trifle with ME, demon. Your piddling sssspells will sssave you from me."  
"Yeah, okay. Fine. You DO know you're about five kilometers from Taer'Kul, right? They have light lancers there, too. Why would you tromp all the way out here and make all this fuss just to talk to me?"  
The rock-plated dragon stared blankly at the veirheelu for a few moments. "Uh... well... jussst five kilometers? Really?" The beast looked somewhat nervous as he glanced to the west. "Well, there wasss talk of sssome trouble in thisss area..."  
"And there's going to be a lot more trouble, if the Church and the Order check up on one of their outlying farming communities and finds an earth dragon chatting it up with a demon lord," Doppler deadpanned. "On top of that, the Israeli Expeditionary Force is patrolling the north, searching for some raiders that attacked a military camp or something. I hear their record for slaying marauding dragons is unmatched."  
"I... I sssee..." The earth dragon sunk lower to the ground, and started glancing from side to side. "Maybe I sshould be going..."  
"Yes, I believe you should," Doppler mumbled, waving absently as he turned around and started to walk away. "I'll let you know if I hear about the pigtailed fellow."  
The dragon, who was turning around to flee, suddenly halted. "Wait... I never sssaid he had a pigtail!"  
Doppler turned his head. "So? Neither did I."  
"But you jussst sssaid it!" The serpent protested.  
"Said what?"  
"That the human hasss a pigtail!"  
Doppler shook his head. "See? YOU just said that the human has a pigtail."  
The dragon opened his mouth to retaliate, but nothing came out except for a rumbling stutter.  
"But... I... you jussst... I sssaid..."  
The veirheelu sighed and walked up to the dragon, patting it on the torso segment of its long, serpentine body. "There, there. Everything's going to be okay. You might try looking for the human to the north; if the IEF is in the area, he'll probably feel better traveling through that region."  
Doppler once again turned away, trying not to smirk as the small spell circle he had pressed onto the dragon slowly faded.  
"I sssee. Thank you, demon." The earth dragon turned to leave, but turned his head back at the last moment. "You know, it'sss sssurprisssing; for a demon lord, you're not that bad a guy."  
This time, Doppler couldn't hide his smile. "Yeah, I get that a lot. Good luck! I hope that human finds you!"  
"You mean you hope I find that human!" The dragon yelled as he sped off, building up speed to dive underground.  
"Yes, that too. Farewell!"

End Chapter 9


	10. Collisions

Species: Zephromorphous Sapien  
Common name: Angel  
Class: Mystic  
Subspecies: Minor subspecies of angel include some strains that lead to unusual colors of wings. The norm for angel wing color ranges from white to yellow, but in several communities mutations have occurred that have caused wings to appear blue, golden, silver, black, and red. Although these aberrations are clearly a result of normal genetic mutation, angels have attached elaborate and provocative meanings to having certain wing colors, and firmly rejected scientific explanation of the variations once those explanations became available to challenge the common beliefs (the fact that angels with unusual wing colors have offspring with unusual wing colors does not seem to be enough practical evidence to abolish millions of years of deeply rooted cultural prejudice; it rarely is).  
Sentience & Intelligence: Relatively high. Angels show intelligence on a level approaching humans, but surprisingly, appear to be less intelligent on average than humans, evon, and elves. While the angel civilizations possess mana-based technology that did not originate on Earth, none but an elite few have any idea how the devices work, or can even operate them. It has been suggested by many elven scholars that angelic manatechnology was not actually created by angels, and this theory has gained nothing but support from those in the intellectual community who have actually spent an extended period of time in angelic lands.  
Physical biology: Although outwardly human-like with the obvious exception of their wings, the angelic respiratory and skeletal system are geared toward the assistance of flight and strenuous activity. An angel has four lungs rather than two, and these are far more efficient in operation, allowing an angel to remain physically active for up to ten times longer than a comparable human being before showing signs of exhaustion (this takes into account fatigue from lack of sleep, which is largely the same for both species). In addition, angel bones have several hollow points within them, similar to the hollow bones of birds, to make flight easier. While this makes the bones more brittle than human equivalents, the bones are cushioned from within so that a powerful impact will ultimately cause less damage.  
Mana resonance: Much higher than the human average, angels in general have a natural talent for detecting and manipulating mana, much like evon do. The difference is that the average angel isn't capable of developing this talent past the most basic aspects of pattern spellcasting, given their limited comprehension. In layman's terms, this means that angels have the resonance to use magic, but rarely have the study skills to learn to use it well.  
Lifespan: An angel's lifespan usually lasts about 5,000 years, although there are plenty of ways in which this may be extended.  
Diet: Omnivorous. Angels show a great love for meat, except for fowl (which is a subject commonly joked about by other species).  
Biological anomalies: There are two anomalies regarding angels that puzzle Earth biologists: one, their wings are feathered, whereas the rest of the angel's body is covered in skin with normal, mammalian hair cells. There are no feather roots anywhere else on the angel's body, which leads one to question if the difference could possibly be the result of natural evolution. Two, the musculature of the wings is not actually powerful enough to lift an angel's body, yet despite this, all angels not suffering from injury or malformations are capable of full flight. That they can fly despite the laws of physics has been determined to be primarily due to their natural mana resonance, but this raises the question of how angels evolved to have wings if the wings, as appendages, are essentially useless without the fully developed magical capability of the modern angel. Many questions regarding magic and its effects on evolutionary mutation have to be solved before further progress can be made on this subject.  
Reproductive type: Sexual.  
Social structure: Angels tend to live in communes that consist exclusively of angels, not unlike elves. What is unlike elves is that angels seem to lack a prejudiced disdain for outsiders and other races, and happily allow other species into their cities without suspicion. They are, however, quite adamant about keeping their permanent population purely angelic (no pun intended), and will not allow other species to settle in their communes, which is one of the many quirks of angelic culture. Angels tend to be noble and kind, but they have an extremely rigid system of cultural norms and values, and it rarely occurs to them that someone of another species might not be knowledgeable of the multiple boundaries of their etiquette. For example, while it is perfectly accepted in many regions for an outsider man to hug and kiss an angelic maiden in greeting, even forgiving any wandering of hands or tongue, an outsider male that sees a female angel in the nude, even if through no fault of his own, may be subject to imprisonment if he does not have access to amnesty of some sort. This is particularly harsh because there is absolutely no requirement of a sexual context to the incident; the cultural boundary allows for no interpretation or leniency. It is these strange and unbendable cultural laws that have labeled angels as being the most "backward" of the noble races. While it is common for angels to leave a commune and settle among other species for any number of reasons, it often takes them a good deal of time to realize that they do not carry their society's cultural laws with them, having suffered many awkward and bitter misunderstandings in the meantime.  
Combat analysis: High. Their ability for flight even when heavily armored gives them several tactical advantages in any kind of battle, and many warriors are capable of flinging bolts of raw, explosive mana energy. Of course, their efficiency in combat usually relies on being led by a commander of a different species, as angels themselves (forgive the intense proliferation of this stereotype) tend to be less suited for making tactical decisions.  
Misc. notes: Angels, just like elves, possess devices that clearly combine magic and ancient, arcane machines that cannot be fully replicated by human science. The difference is, as discussed previously, that angels commonly have little to no idea how the devices work or how they were invented. Also unlike the elves' magitechnology, the angels cannot break down their manatechnology (so called because of its tendency to use flows of raw mana rather than magical pattern constructs) into pieces and units for modifications, improvements, or even repairs; each device is fabricated wholly one at a time, from a single source schematic, and destroyed once it stops operating. Even those angels that know how a device works cannot describe it in terms of individual components and their functions that contribute to the whole machine, and thus angels have made no improvements at all in manatechnology since the individual device schematics were finished. This further reinforces the common theory that manatechnology is not actually angelic in origin, though it's far from concrete evidence.

US Research Division Omega - Survey File N627

Nexus II  
by Black Dragon I own neither dungeons nor dragons nor Ranma.

Chapter 10  
Collisions

K glanced backward from where he was perched on Ranma's shoulder, staring nervously at Rayden, who lumbered along far behind.  
The normally happy-go-lucky demon was trudging along with his hands in his pockets, holding his head down so that his hair eclipsed his eyes. He made no attempt to catch up with his companions, simply keeping pace at the given distance in complete silence.

The metadragon turned toward Ranma.  
"You gotta do something. Look at him. It's pitiful," K insisted, jabbing a wing in Rayden's direction.  
"What am I supposed to do?" Ranma mumbled. "I really don't even see what the problem is. His eyes are all better, the swelling is gone, and he stopped vomiting a long time ago. He's the picture of health."  
"What about emotional health, huh?" K asked sternly.  
"You're asking about the emotional health of a psychopathic demon who may or may not hear voices telling him to kill," Ranma noted. "Depression isn't necessarily a step down for him. Besides, since when do you care about him?"  
"Dude, ANYBODY would feel sorry for him. You splashed that stuff right in his face!" K muttered, his eyes narrowing.  
"So? It was holy water! HOLY WATER! How the hell was I supposed to know it'd hurt him? It's ridiculous!" Ranma insisted, trying his best to shout without raising his voice high enough for Rayden to hear.  
"You didn't have to be such an ass about it."  
Ranma crossed his arms over his chest. "Hey, in my defense, I stopped laughing WAY sooner than I wanted to. I think I deserve a little credit for that kind of self-control."  
"Would you just talk to him? You're the leader, here!" K insisted irritably. "And you know what? He looks up to you! I'll bet what he's so bummed about is that you had to see him like that! These martial demons are all about fierce reputations and not showing weakness and fear and that nonsense. He must feel totally humiliated to have been on his knees puking while you were trying to stop giggling!"  
Ranma groaned, massaging his head. "Okay, okay... so what am I supposed to do, pat him on the back and tell him he's not a complete loser?"  
K nodded. "A little dishonesty goes a long way in these situations."

Rayden kicked a pebble out of his way as he trudged along behind his two companions.  
His eyes still itched slightly from the haunting memory of the incidents in Taer'Kul, and the dark paladin almost wanted to cry when he recalled how Ranma had been forced to drag his trembling, immobile body out of the city, collecting their weapons himself and irritably bidding the gate guards farewell as the elven wretches fell to the ground in laughter at the sight.  
'In the long run, I really couldn't get any more disgraced than I already was,' Rayden reasoned, thinking back to his exile from the Third Brotherhood, 'but man! I lost it right in front of Ranma! What kind of dark paladin am I, being saved by a human all the time?' Thoughts of his weakness and Ranma's judgment of that weakness wracked his mind in equal measure, and the demonic knight sighed deeply before he started rooting around inside his coat.  
"The hell with this. I need to start drowning my sorrows instead of drowning in them," he said, pulling out a large, dirty bottle of brandy.  
"Now, now, we'll have none of that," Ranma said suddenly, startling the demon knight as he wrenched the bottle of alcohol away.  
"Hey! That's mine!" Rayden said. He had meant to sound angry and on the verge of irrational violence, but in his current state his protest came out as more of a bitter whine.  
"Yeah, whatever. Shut up and listen," Ranma mumbled, tossing away the flask and placing a hand on Rayden's shoulder as they walked. "Look, you've gotta stop feeling sorry for yourself, okay? It's starting to get on my nerves."  
Rayden flinched.  
"So you have a bad allergy," Ranma continued, not noticing his reaction, "yeah, it's kind of embarrassing, but you've been living with it so far, right? So get over it. It's not so bad to have a weakness, even if it's something weird and kind of funny."  
Rayden frowned, considering the smaller man's words. "Okay... so, do YOU have a weakness?"  
"Of course not," Ranma scoffed, "weaknesses are for chumps. But if you have one, that just means you should work harder to compensate for it."  
"Work harder?" Rayden asked, blinking.  
"Yeah. I mean, you haven't really been doing your part to help out up until now, you know? You get us into more trouble than you take care of. Twice now, I've had to drag you out of a battlezone," Ranma chided. "You've gotta start doing your part! Fighting and cooking are the only things you're any good at, so you'd better do them well!"  
The demon knight digested this for a moment, then smiled slightly and nodded. "Right! You got it!"  
"Great!" Ranma said brightly, slapping the bigger man on the shoulder. "And you can start right now! Go find some meat, slaughter it, and cook us up a big dinner, 'kay?"  
"Got it, boss!"

Perched on a rock several feet away, K watched curiously as Rayden suddenly dashed away, looking much happier than before.  
Ranma approached with his hands in his pockets, looking quite pleased himself. "Heh. No problem. This leadership business is a cakewalk!"  
K nodded, glad to see that their team had regained it former standards of morale. "That's good! Where'd he run off to?"  
"Eh, he's just finding some dumb animal and killing it for dinner. We'll find some wood and camp nearby here for the night." Ranma shifted the weight of the pack on his shoulders slightly as K flew up and perched atop it.  
"Hmmmm... he might not be back for a while, then," K reasoned, musing out loud. "The farms around here are supposed to be evenly spaced around the city, so most of the local wildlife has receded."  
Ranma frowned as he reached a small patch of trees on an outcropping. Having reached the cliffs north of Taer'Kul, most of the terrain was rocky, splintered plateaus, bluffs, and canyons with vicious crags jutting out of the depths of the stone pits. Trees were sparse, but thanks to the dry, rocky ground, dry sticks were plentiful; perfect for a fire.  
"So... wait a minute. How do you know about the area around Taer'Kul?" Ranma knew K was knowledgeable for a draconic child, but having local knowledge about a recently constructed city seemed strange.  
"Well, it was taking a while to get your sword identified, so I talked to a few of the guys waiting to have their stuff enchanted."  
"Hm," Ranma mumbled, leaning over to pick up some sticks. "They say anything about what kinda animals someone can find around this place?"  
K thought about it for a moment. "Well, deathcrawlers make nests in the rock crevices in some places, so I guess he could cook us up another one of those."  
Ranma nodded, smiling at the thought of the tasty demon spider. "Sounds good. Is that all there is around here?"  
"Well, there WERE some wild herds around here, but apparently the dragons scared them all away."  
Ranma stopped dead. "Dragons? Dragons where? Why are you mentioning dragons?"  
K raised an eyebrow. "Well, one of the priests said that for some reason, dragons had been appearing around this area. Sometimes they attack the surrounding villages, other times they just snatch up some cattle, and sometimes they just fly right on by, as if searching for something. Of course, WE know what they're searching for, but I wasn't about to tell him that."  
Ranma chewed his lip pensively. "Huh... I really didn't imagine that they'd venture so close to the city."  
K shrugged. "Eh, whatever. The light lancers keep 'em from causing too much damage; the Church of Sayg has a pretty good record for dragon-slaying," the metadragon admitted somewhat bitterly, "and the ones this Dashtall geek sent after us have no other support. In the meantime, we should have no problem avoiding them."  
"Right..." Ranma said, not sounding very sure at all.  
"So anyway, what was the sword all about?" K asked eagerly, hopping onto Ranma's shoulder.  
Ranma sweatdropped. "Ah. Yeah. Well... it's a... a defect."  
K blinked. "What?"  
"A defect. Or you might call it an experiment."  
"What are you talking about? That sword's no defect! It cuts way better than it should!"  
"That's what I said," Ranma mumbled irritably, "and then she raised a very good point: all magic swords cut more easily than they should, otherwise there'd be no point to having a magic sword. Unfortunately, that's the only enchantment that actually works."  
Sighing, the pigtailed man drew the rusted katana slowly, and then pointed at the blood-encrusted runes etched into the sides. "You see these markings here? These are the spell symbols for all the enchantments that were originally cast on this thing. Apparently some of them were experimental. Others were redundant. A few were outright incompatible. And a couple of them she couldn't even identify, though she was sure they were no longer in effect. Some amateur enchanter just crammed all this stuff onto a single weapon, and failed completely. Out of eighteen enchantments, the only one that works is the one that generates a magical edge during an attack. All the others, including the basic ones to keep the weapon from rusting or dulling, have failed."  
K winced. "So... this wonderful Ninja sword that's been handed down for generations... is some magic smith's bargain bin reject?"  
"Yup," Ranma said, sheathing the blade once more. "The only other interesting thing about it is that the blended and faded magic effects sort of picked up on being used by Ninja over the centuries, and apparently now they channel ki very easily as a result, which goes further to enhance the cutting power... but that's it. She even says that it can't be used to block heavier weapons because it'll break."  
"Wow. That's... lame," K admitted, "but hardly surprising."  
_KA-KROOOM!!_  
The ground shook slightly as a distant explosion erupted from the canyon beyond, and Ranma quickly looked at his watch.  
"Wow. He took WAY longer than I thought he would."  
"What? Who? What's going on?" K asked, panicking as he saw a distant plume of dust rise into the air.  
Ranma sighed and scrubbed his head with his hand, "Oh, that's just Rayden attacking one of the dragons scouting around here."  
"Are you sure?" K asked, blinking.  
"Well, once I realized there were dragons around here, I figured it was pretty much just a matter of time; without me around to tell him not to, Rayden naturally attacked the biggest, baddest, nastiest monster he could find."  
K nodded slowly. "Ah. Kinda makes you wonder how he's managed to live this long, huh?"  
_BOOM!!_ "SHRRRAAAAUGH!!" A bestial screech tore through the air, and Ranma and K winced.  
"Sooo..." the metadragon said hesitantly, "... shouldn't we be going?"  
"Yeah, yeah. I just need to decide something," Ranma mumbled, rubbing his chin in contemplation.  
"Like what?"  
"Like which direction I should be running," Ranma said somewhat bitterly. "We've been through this before; I don't like to tangle with dragons unless it's on my terms."  
"Even so, we can't just leave Ray to die by himself!" K protested.  
Ranma considered this for a long moment. "You know, he'd probably disagree."  
"Ranma!"  
"Okay, okay! I'm going! Yeesh."  
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Oh, blessed lord of justice! Great avenger who brings fire to our souls and lightning to our blades!" Kaze sang exuberantly, raising a hand in the air, "we call now upon your judgment, Lord Malakai! Let your light pierce the sky and drown our foes before us! Let the unworthy perish in the fires of your wrath, and let your noble children surge forth to purge the foul beasts!"  
Gesturing grandly with his hands in the air, the Eye of Malakai floated up from the floor to hover at chest level before its new owner.  
"In your name, I, Kaze Toren, shall be judge and executioner! GUILTY!!"

Chiima sweatdropped slightly. "Hmm... I rather liked it... until the end. 'Guilty' doesn't sound right..."  
Kaze put his arms down and rubbed his chin as he stared at his reflection in the mirror, the Eye moving slightly so that it floated above his shoulder. "Yes, you're right. If I play on the 'judge' thing too much, it does start to sound corny. How about something more utilitarian? Like 'CHARGE!'?"  
"No... I think a phrase would be appropriate, more than just a word. Something like 'Fall before my light,' or that nature," Chiima said carefully, arms crossed over his chest.  
"Really? You don't think it's too verbose as it is?" Kaze asked, mentally calculating the amount of time it would take to make the entire speech. "What if we face an enemy with a short attention span?"  
"Well, for you, verbose is appropriate. The enemy will just have to be patient," the angelic paladin said decisively, nodding.  
"Now THIS is a pathetic sight."

Chiima and Kaze both turned around at the high-pitched, overly-elegant voice. Chiima bowed low. Kaze just smirked.  
"Ah, hello Sai! Having a pleasant day?" The evon asked casually, invoking the nickname he had come up with for his former superior.  
Saima bristled, remembering the recent times in which she could have swatted Kaze upside the head for not addressing her with respect. "You've spent that last three hours making speeches to tell of your greatness and gesturing in the mirror. Has your sudden and undeserved rise in the ranks gone so completely to your head?"  
"Jealousy does not become you, Sai," Kaze said, unperturbed.  
"I am NOT jealous!" The elven woman seethed. "I never expected or even hoped I would be avatar! I'm simply appalled that such a gift was wasted on YOU."  
"Bishop Saima!" Chiima suddenly shouted, startling both of the others. The angel glared hard at the elf, his wings ruffling slightly. "I realize that you do not get along well with the Avatar, and that recent events must be very awkward for you, but just as he treated you with deference and respect when you were his superior, you will do the same for him now that he is yours!"  
The bishop stepped back, revolted at the thought, and somewhat intimidated by the large, muscular angel staring down at her. "I... but he..."  
"Now, now, that's enough," Kaze said, laying a hand on Chiima's shoulder and pulling him back. "Thank you Chiima, but you needn't be so hard on the bishop." He grasped his hands together behind his back. "I'm sure the good bishop isn't so able to appreciate the irony of my sudden rise to power as I am."  
Saima fumed for a moment, torn between her anger at Kaze for pointing out the obvious to mock her, and appreciation for him being unnecessarily reasonable and kind about it. "It takes more than a magic gem to be avatar, Toren!" She said with less heat than before, "Whatever the cardinal thinks, as you are now you're just a naive, inexperienced prankster with a new toy! Avatars are heroes of legend, able to build or crush civilizations by their will! You're not there yet!"  
Kaze frowned. "Yes, yes. I suppose you're right. I should spend time preparing for my campaign, not my battle monologues!"  
Saima nodded, smiling slightly as she realized that Kaze was actually taking her seriously. 'Strange. He gives me more credit now that he outranks me and can ignore me than he did when I was trying my best to teach him.' "Leaving on a campaign already? So the cardinal is going to instruct you in the field?"  
Kaze blinked. "Cardinal? No, Risal is no longer here."  
Saima jerked back in surprise. "Wh-What? Why not? Wasn't he supposed to teach you of your new skills and instruct you in your duties?"  
"Yeah, something like that," Kaze said dismissively, turning back toward the mirror and making the Eye of Malakai float in lazy circles around his head. "But I said I'd be fine on my own, so I let him go back to... uh... whatever it is that cardinals do when they're not chasing around vague, hallucinatory objectives."  
"But... you can't!" Saima blubbered, waving her arms about wildly. "It's too soon! You can't lead a campaign! There's still too much to be done first! You must be properly equipped, learn about your duties, and meet the Inner Council! And there's so much else! Do your parents even know of this yet?"  
Kaze grimaced and let the Eye fall into his hand. "Yeah... I've actually taken a few steps to keep this news from reaching them so fast. I mean, I can't hide it from them for long, and I don't want to look like I'm trying to, but I've taken a few precautions to slow down the inevitable."  
The elf gaped. "... WHY?"  
"Because as soon as they find out I'm avatar, they're going to drag me to that dead-end realm of Soral, gush over me and make me study for a decade, and then send me out on grand, noble crusades alongside the finest and strictest warriors and nobles in all the Order," Kaze said irritably.  
Saima continued gaping. "But... that's what avatars DO."  
"Which is why I'm delaying it so I won't have to put up with that nonsense immediately," Kaze said smugly, finally walking away from the mirror with Chiima keeping pace behind him. "I've just been handed a whopping big ball of crystal power and the authority to use it for pretty much whatever I want; I have to enjoy it while I still can."  
"The point of an avatar isn't to give the individual a means of fulfilling their petty, selfish desires!" Saima groused as she followed Kaze out of his room and into dormitory halls. "The point is to have a champion who personifies our values and is a beacon of nobility and faith! Someone for the acolytes and trainees to look up to and model themselves after! Are you really going to soil the legacy of your predecessor by using your new power to serve yourself?"  
"Okay, fine, I'll do it later," Kaze said off-handedly. Chiima sweatdropped; apparently he had stopped listening.  
The reason for his distraction became apparent once the other two devotees noticed three young priestesses-in-training rushing down the hall toward them, giggling in excitement.

"Avatar Toren! Avatar Toren! Are you really leaving on a crusade so soon after you've been ordained?" one of them said as they all gathered around him.  
"Oh, of course! I'm not nearly strong enough to perform my duties as I am now!" Kaze said while rubbing his chin and smiling, looking extremely arrogant in contrast to his humble words. "I must undertake a grand journey and earn the experience to do my station justice!"  
"Wow! You're so cool!" Another acolyte said as Kaze took two of them around the waist with his arms and continued down the hall.

Chiima got a worried look on his face as he saw Saima looking decidedly ill. "Bishop?"  
"Don't mind me," the elf said bitterly, leaning over and holding her abdomen "this isn't the first time I've felt this sick since that debacle yesterday, and I'm sure it won't be the last."

"So if you all work hard while I'm gone, upon my return I may be able to find special **positions** for you in the inner circle!" Kaze said smoothly, winking as he rubbed one girl's thigh.  
"Oh, do you think so? You're the best!" That same girl replied happily, having her sentiments echoed by the others.  
"Do you have to leave right away? Why don't you stay for another night so we can celebrate?" another girl said in a sultry tone as she drew circles on the evon's chest.  
Kaze sighed regretfully. "Ah, as much as I would love to, my job can't be all fun and games. Upon my return, then!" Finally letting go of the acolytes, he stepped forward down the hall ahead of them, stopping quickly to give them a final grin that caused the three girls to swoon in response.

"Bishop, are you all right? You seem to be getting worse..." Chiima asked fretfully as the elven woman leaned against the wall with her hand clamped firmly over her mouth.  
"Hate... that man... so much..." The bishop said between shuddering gulps of air. Inwardly she burned the identities of the three acolytes in her mind to be recalled later; she had special types of duties to give to trainees that displayed such idiotic behavior.  
"Chiima! Sai! Don't fall behind!" Kaze called back to them, walking into one of the map rooms.  
"Yes Avatar!" Chiima said immediately, grabbing Saima's hand and yanking her along.  
As they entered, Kaze shook his head.  
"Come now Chiima, we're good friends. Please, call me Kaze."  
"As you wish, Avatar," Chiima said reverently, causing the others to sweatdrop.  
"Well... okay, fine. Let's just get this show on the road," the evon mumbled, turning to a world map laid out on the meeting table with a small regional map on top of it.  
Saima frowned. "So what is the purpose of this campaign, exactly? The Order doesn't have any major contracts or requests at the moment... Well, except... uh..." She glanced worriedly at Kaze. "You're not planning on hunting dragons, are you?"  
Kaze snorted. "Oh, yes, of course. What better way to start out my tenure as Avatar of my order than suicide?" He gave the elf a half-lidded stare. "I may agree with you that I'm a poor choice as a champion, but I've no plans to allow the selection of a new one any time soon. This campaign will have nothing to do with dragons."  
Saima nodded neutrally. 'I should've known he wouldn't do something so dangerous. He may be immoral, but he still has common sense.'  
"This campaign is to eliminate the lair of Genex Karl, the golem master to the south," Kaze said, pointing to a location in the south-eastern wastes that the pre-war world map marked as South Korea. "His undead armies harass the surrounding communities at random, and he causes chaos without rhyme or reason. Eliminating him will be the perfect assignment to cut my teeth on." Kaze crossed his arms over his chest, proud of himself.  
Saima raised an eyebrow. "A minor demon lord without a proper directive or fortifications... hmmmm... still, he does possess an army. Isn't this a bit out of your league?"  
"I'll never become a proper avatar by being timid," Kaze asserted firmly. "This opponent possesses great power, but very poor tactical proficiency. It will be the perfect test of both my strength, skills, and wit."  
"Agreed!" Chiima said excitedly, his wings ruffling. "Avatar, allow me the honor of accompanying you!"  
"'Kay," Kaze said without a hint of ceremony. "Select two good paladins and a monk to accompany us, Chiima. The paladins should be women, if possible." Then he turned toward Saima, ignoring her glare. "Sai, I'd also like you to come with me on this campaign."  
Saima recoiled. "What? Why?" She couldn't imagine why Kaze would willingly subject himself to her nagging and other attempts at discipline when he was obviously taking every opportunity to escape the cathedral and his former life there. The idea that she was another woman to sate Kaze's lechery was considered and swiftly discarded; while Saima considered herself attractive, the evon miscreant had never shown any interest in her, and must know that she wouldn't respond favorably to that type of behavior.  
Kaze shrugged. "Well, besides having a second cleric in our party to better our chances against the undead horde, your depth of experience is far greater than mine and even Chiima's. Against a foe widely rumored to be an insane fool, wisdom and foresight are more valuable than even the strongest magic."  
Saima grunted as she physically struggled against the urge to be impressed. 'How does he manage to flip so quickly from being a scumbag to being a humble and intelligent leader?' "That's very wise of you, Toren," Saima said with a neutral expression, "but I'm afraid I'll have to decline. I've much to do here, and I've grown too used to civilian duties. Without some retraining and about a month of study, I couldn't possibly take up a combat mission."  
Kaze frowned, considering the excuse. "Very well. I retract my request."  
Saima nodded, and turned to leave.  
"Now it's an order," Kaze said smugly, stopping the elf in her tracks. "Bishop Saima, you are hereby conscripted into my personal company. We will leave in three hours."  
The elven woman turned around, shocked. "Wh-What? You can't do that!"  
"Of course he can do that," Chiima said condescendingly, "he's the avatar."  
"But... I... I can't just-"  
Kaze cut her off. "I'm aware that you have many duties here in the cathedral. So you'd best hurry and find replacements for those duties so they'll be taken care of while we're gone. Oh! And then you should gear up. Take whatever you want from the armories and libraries; I'll give the armsmaster my authorization."  
Saima seethed as she ground her teeth furiously. "You won't get away with this, Toren!"  
"Yeah, fine. Hurry up, now. Shoo!"

As the bishop stomped away furiously, Kaze snickered to himself, earning a curious look from Chiima.  
"Why did you make her come with us? Do you really think her help will be worth the making her upset?" The angel asked, scratching his head.  
Kaze's snickers got louder. "Making her upset is the point, Chiima. With an opportunity like this in front of me, how could I live with myself if I gave up the chance to have her kowtow to me?"  
"Oh... that's rather... petty of you, Avatar," Chiima said cautiously, apparently not willing to fall into an outright lecture now that Kaze was leaps and bounds above him in rank.  
"Petty is what this campaign is all about, my friend," Kaze admitted shamelessly. "A petty skirmish against a petty opponent to fulfill my petty ambitions."  
"But... what about all that stuff about sharpening your skills so you're better prepared to serve the greater cause of peace and justice?" The angel asked, sweatdropping.  
Kaze considered that, recognizing that he was dangerously close to completely disillusioning his angelic friend. "Well, all of that is true, from a certain point of view. I'm accomplishing more here than merely satisfying my own personal ends."  
Chiima nodded, swallowing the half-hearted rationalization easily.  
"Very good, then! Make your selections and tell them to get their affairs in order! Today marks the beginning of Karl's end! In the name of Malakai!"  
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Die, man-beassst!" The earth dragon hissed as it charged forward while hot, steaming blood gushed from a sizzling wound in its neck.  
Rayden grimaced as he pushed himself off of the magically summoned rock spires that had gored him, clumsily trying to get to his sword before his opponent got to him. He didn't quite make it.  
_CRUNCH!!_ The sound of splintering rock was accompanied by a sickening snap as the dragon rammed Rayden into the wall of the canyon, the armored crest over his snout grinding through the much smaller creature's ribcage.  
The serpent immediately drew back, glaring at the demonic knight as the deep, throbbing cut slowly sealed itself.  
Rayden didn't move, and the dragon slowly grinned as he watched a pool of thick blood form underneath his crushed form.  
"Vile creature. Die like the worm you are!" He hissed, snapping his head around as he once again started patrolling the length of the canyon floor.

Long after the dust from the dragon's departure had settled, Ranma jumped from the edge of the cliffs above, landing on the opposite face and sliding down the vertical wall on his heel.  
"Rayden! Are you _Cough! Cough!_ all right?" K shouted, catching a lot of the dust Ranma was trailing from his steady descent and wishing he had just flown down on his own.  
Ranma hopped off the cliff face, and then jogged over to Rayden's bleeding form wordlessly.  
"Ray! Damn! We're too late!" K said, his tail drooping as he gazed upon the broken warrior.  
Ranma frowned. Then he slowly walked up to Rayden's body and placed a hand on his neck.  
"No we're not. He's still alive," Ranma said neutrally, not surprised in the least.  
K, for his part, was shocked. "Well... we gotta do something! He may be alive now, but he won't be for long!"  
Ranma leaned in toward Rayden's ear. "RAY!! HEY, YOU AWAKE? GET UP, MAN!!"  
"Guh! Wah?" The demon knight blinked groggily as he slowly came to, and then noticed Ranma standing next to him. "R-Ranma? What're you... Wait, the dragon! Damn, I lost!" Rayden cursed, noting the intense pain he was in.  
Ranma sweatdropped. "Looks like it. I'm guessing you don't win all your fights; you aren't very good at picking your battles. Do your enemies usually leave you for dead?"  
"All the time," Rayden mumbled, twitching slightly as he tried to move. "I mean, I guess I can understand; I look a lot like a human, so they assume that impaling me or cutting me in half will kill me like it would a human. Most demons don't even know what a 'pulse' is." His head jerked slightly from side to side. "Hey, Ranma? I can't move my neck, and my chest hurts like hell. Can you tell what's wrong with it?"  
Ranma and K winced. "Uh... yeah..." The pigtailed wanderer said slowly. "It's sort of... crushed."  
Rayden frowned. "Like 'caved in' crushed, or 'flattened into paste' crushed?"  
"'Caved in' crushed," Ranma replied, deciding to ignore the implication that Rayden could remain alive with his entire upper torso destroyed.  
"Okay then. Here we go!" With that said, Rayden inhaled deeply, and Ranma jerked backward as the demon's chest slowly expanded to its former volume, accompanied by an entirely understandable cacophony of cracking and creaking. "There we are!" The Dread Knight said in satisfaction, finding that he could move his arms again. "And now..."  
Ranma and K, already quite disturbed, quickly turned around as Rayden grasped his head with his hands, knowing what was coming next.  
_Crack! Crack! Crack!_ "There! Perfect!"  
Turning back around, Ranma's eyebrow twitched as he realized that his demonic companion had wrenched his neck back into place. "So, are you okay, or what? Is that it?"  
Rayden frowned. "Of course I'm not okay. I let that overgrown snake beat me. Damn it! And right after what you told me about my only strength being my killing power!"  
"Yeah, about that," Ranma started, "I also told you to hunt something for dinner. Why did you go and attack the nearest monster you could find?"  
Rayden blinked, turning toward his leader. "For dinner, obviously."  
Ranma's eyes went flat as K's eyes went wide.  
"You were going to kill a dragon for food?" They both said, one in alarm, and the other in exasperation.  
"Well, yeah. Why?"  
"Putting aside the fact that a dragon is probably the only thing around here higher on the food chain than you," Ranma began, "can you even eat dragon?"  
"Of course you can eat dragon," Rayden responded, rolling his eyes.  
"NO, YOU CAN'T!!" K shouted furiously.  
"I mean, they're not easy to cook, granted," Rayden said, thinking that K's protest came from common misconceptions rather than a distaste for cannibalism, "but you happen to be traveling with one of the elite few chefs trained and ordained to cook and serve dragon meat!"  
"I know we've sort of brought this up before, but I think the subject bears further attention," Ranma mumbled, "HOW did a dark paladin end up with super-rare cooking skills?"  
Rayden slowly pushed himself out of the indentation he had made in the cliff face as he replied. "Well, I spent a long time with this royal family so that I could learn to kill dragons. But the main hunter decided that I was no good or something-some ridiculous story about dragon hunting needing cunning instead of brute force-and I didn't really have much to do. So I started learning from the chef who cooked the dragons instead, since that was an area that I had talent. Then I had to kill the dragon hunter and destroy the palace and... well, that really has nothing to do with it." He started to stretch himself out, creating more nasty popping noises. "Bottom line, I saw the earth dragon and thought we could cook up some nice steaks. A lot of steaks. Big ones, too."  
"Well, forget it!" K shouted, glaring at the demon. "There will be no eating of dragons! It's forbidden, you hear me?"  
Rayden gave him a look. "Why? Just because you're one too?"  
K bristled. "It's not JUST that! Dragons are intelligent, sentient creatures!"  
"But they're jerks," Rayden reasoned.  
"He's got a point. You guys ARE jerks," Ranma agreed.  
"Idiot! Don't encourage him!" K snarled, slapping Ranma's head with a metal wing. "You can't eat dragons! It's not right!"  
"I'm generally allowed a lot of leeway as far as right and wrong are concerned," Rayden replied, looking somewhat smug. The expression was completely wasted, as he still looked rather pathetic with most of his body bloody and torn.  
"How would you feel if I was eating humans?" K asked, his eyes narrowing.  
"Disgusted. Like I've said before, human meat is seriously low-grade junk," Rayden said, making a face. "Not that I'd put it past you. I've seen what you normally eat. Aluminum is one of the few things even I can't season."  
K shook his head. "No, that's not what I... Urgh! Okay, fine! How would you feel if I ate a demon?"  
"What kind of demon? I eat demons all the time, but you have to choose the right breeds. Warrior breeds are usually the worst for-"  
"GAAAH!!" K screamed, flapping his wings wildly. "Forget it! You're an idiot! Ranma, YOU talk to him!"  
The pigtailed man winced, then rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "Hmmmm... tell me, Ray... your **venom strike** technique..."  
Rayden blinked. "Yeah? What about it?" K also stared at Ranma, his eyes narrowing suspiciously.  
"That's your ultimate technique, right? How effective would that be for cutting through a dragon's body?" K's eyes widened at the question.  
"As effective as anything else; I'd tear through it like jelly," Rayden said, grinning. "The problem is that the energy takes a bit of time to summon, and I can't hold the charge while moving around a lot. That's why I can't manage a good hit with the **venom strike** while battling a dragon."  
"Right, right, I figured as much from when you wasted Saffron way back when."  
"Ranma!" K shouted. "What are you doing? Don't tell me you're actually condoning this!"  
"Oh, shut up you big baby," Ranma snapped, glaring at the tiny metadragon. "These dragons have done nothing but harrass and hurt people for the purpose of trying to kill me for no good reason; I have absolutely no reason to spare them and every reason to kill them if I can manage to do so. And if we're going to kill them, we might as well eat what we kill, right?"  
"This is outrageous!" K snarled. "So if we kill some human bandits, we're obligated to eat them?"  
"HELLO!" Rayden said, annoyed. "Bad meat? Remember? I've said that like three times so far. It's no good."  
"Besides, that would be cannibalism. And cannibalism is wrong," Ranma said with his arms crossed over his chest. "So, you know... no dragon meat for you."  
"That's what I'm trying to... I mean, you can't just... AARGH!! You guys suck!" K shouted angrily, suddenly leaping off of Ranma's shoulder and flying away through the canyon in a huff.

Rayden raised an eyebrow as he watched the tiny metal beast take off, and then turned toward Ranma. "Uh... should we go after him?"  
Ranma shook his head. "Nah. He'll get over it. He's just a kid, and has to come to terms with the fact that the rest of his species consists of murderous, idiot monsters. Who are apparently edible. That's not something that's easy to swallow."  
"I disagree," Rayden said.  
"Yeah, you would," Ranma murmured, "now shut up and listen. I'm going to teach you how to hunt dragons... uh... hey, do you need time to rest, or what?" he asked, remembering that his companion had only put himself back together moments ago.  
Rayden frowned, not answering immediately. Then he rummaged inside his coat and pulled out a bottle of liquor.  
"Uh, Ray..." Ranma trailed off as the demon warrior raised a hand to forestall him.  
Rayden gulped down as much of the bottle as possible, then gasped as he finally pulled it away from his lips. Then he looked down at his body.  
A fresh mix of bloody liquid flushed through the side of his coat and began trickling down his leg.  
He looked back up at Ranma. "Gimme half an hour."  
"Why don't you take a full hour?" Ranma offered, trying his best not to look as horrified as he felt.  
"Hey, thanks!"  
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

K mumbled bitterly to himself as he followed the path of the canyon floor, neither knowing nor caring where he was headed at present.  
"Stupid jerks... I can't believe they'd do stuff like that. It's not right. Not right at all, I tell you..."  
The metadragon frowned as he continued flying at a comfortable cruising speed.  
"Well, okay. I can believe that Rayden would do that. He's a demon and self-described remorseless killer. But I can't believe Ranma would condone something like that!"  
More time was spent flying in silence before he sighed.  
"Actually, Ranma always did say he hated dragons in general, and I guess he has a point about not having any reason not to kill them."  
K looked downcast as he continued flying away, already regretting his outburst and subsequent flight. "Now what am I supposed to do? I still don't think it's right for them to eat a dragon, but... I guess that kind of thing just makes me nervous about where I stand with them." While K had plenty of faith that Ranma saw him as an actual friend rather than a pet, and that Rayden recognized this, he had not grown up in any kind of environment to foster the kind of self-confidence that most dragons possessed from lives of power and opulence.  
"I mean, when you get right down to it, all I can do is eat their gear and give them lots of detailed information that they don't want in the first place. I can't fight, I can't cook, I'm too small to fly them anywhere or cast any spells. I'm useless."  
At a different time, K may have actually remembered his numerous occasions of usefulness as translator and decoy, or at least reasoned that he caused far less trouble than Rayden did, but at the moment he was far too busy wallowing in self-depression to think rationally.  
So deep was he in despair that he almost missed the long, dark brown serpentine form that had stopped in the middle of the canyon ahead of him, bunched up in a huge, scaly pile.  
Barely managing to keep himself from yelping audibly, K gently landed and darted behind a small rock outcropping, giving a short thanks to whatever forces were responsible for delaying his adolescent growth and keeping him the size of a terrier.  
Glancing out from behind the rock, K started making notes as to the earth dragon's condition; he seemed to be wounded, but not badly enough to force the creature to stop and rest.  
'Must be Rayden's work,' K guessed, impressed both by the demon's strength, and his utter recklessness in attacking a creature so much more powerful than himself simply to have a luxurious meal.  
The dragon hadn't seen K yet, and in fact seemed to be engrossed with something out of sight of both of them; he was staring intently at a point on the cliff face, his tail twitching slightly and betraying his amusement.  
Frowning, K stretched out his own woefully undeveloped draconic senses, and was immediately overwhelmed. Just above the edge of the cliff, a source of extraordinarily powerful magics was moving at a leisurely pace, accompanied or carried by several life forms.  
K quickly ceased his concentration and shook his head. 'Dang, now I'm dizzy. I've gotta learn to use those senses better...'

_Crunch!_ The sounds of rock being smashed apart was followed by a heavy rumbling noise, and K's eyes widened as he turned his attention back toward the earth dragon, only to see the tip of the beast's tail as it burrowed into the cliff wall.  
'Uh oh! He must be after the source of that magic!' K thought, quickly taking flight. 'Maybe I should go get Ranma and Rayden! ... Nah, forget it. They probably won't want to help. And besides, if someone with such strong magic gets a warning in time, they should be able to protect themselves!'  
Clearing the roof of the canyon, K swept over the cliff and quickly spotted the party that had the magic artifact in its possession. It was a small group, consisting of three armored figures who were clearly armed for physical conflict, and three characters in long travel robes who were clearly not.  
"Hey! Hey, you there!" K shouted, zipping toward the group at his top speed and hoping that his diminutive size would let them disregard him as a threat.  
The entire group stopped in their tracks and turned to face him, the knights placing their hands on their swords.  
None of them showed any further evidence of defensive action once they got a good look at what was coming toward them.

"What in the name of Devra Bashim is that?" Saima murmured, squinting slightly at the bright object zipping toward them as the midday sun shined off of its carapace.  
Chiima had a slightly better view, and his eyes weren't as sensitive. "It's a... I think it's a dragon. A tiny one. And silver, too."  
"Huh. Too small to be attacking us. I wonder what he wants," Kaze mumbled, stepping forward with the Eye of Malakai floating behind him.  
K approached rapidly, his head darting from side to side as he looked for evidence of the earth dragon's ambush. "You guys! Be careful! There's a dragon around here!" He said, landing somewhat clumsily in front of Kaze in his haste to reach the travelers.  
Kaze stared down at the metal draconian for a moment. Then he smiled. "There sure is! And he's such a cute little guy, too! What's your name, little fella?"  
K stared at the evon, shocked, but managed to shake off his surprise in time. "No, not me! Another dragon!"  
"And is he as adorable as you?" Kaze asked, leaning down to pat the metadragon on the head.  
K sweatdropped. "No. No, he's not."  
"Oh." Kaze blinked. "OH. That's not good, then."  
"Where is it?" Saima asked, rushing forward. "If its still a ways off, we can make it to-"  
She stopped speaking as the ground started to tremble, and a distant rumbling started to get louder.  
"It's not a ways off," K said miserably, hopping off the ground and flapping his wings to get some altitude. "Get ready! It's an earth dragon!"  
"Damnation!" Chiima cursed, drawing his blade and jumping into the air, himself taking flight. "Avatar, flee for the city! I should be able to distract it long enough for you to escape and then get away myself!"  
"No good!" K shouted, "He senses that yellow orb thingy! That's what he's after!"  
"Where is it coming up?" One of the paladins asked in a panic, trying not to bunch up with her other earthbound companions.  
At last, the tremors reached a crescendo, and dirt and rock blasted upward around that same paladin as a massive brown shape emerged from the earth.

The earth dragon twitched slightly as he turned to face the rest of the party, slowly chewing the paladin he had snatched up on his emergence.  
"Adrianna! You monster!" Chiima seethed, holding his blade back and charging it with energy.  
_Gulp!_ "Bah. I hate canned food," the dragon hissed, grimacing at the damaged armor that dragged itself down his throat with sharp, torn edges digging into his relatively soft esophagus. A sharp stinging sensation brought his attention to Chiima, who had launched an energy wave at him with his sword. The dragon shrugged it off. "Foolisssh bird. I'll deal with you later."  
Then he turned his attention to the evon who possessed the item of interest. "Hmmm. Not the creature I wasss looking for... oh well." Darting forward, the earth dragon pulled the rest of its long, snake-like body out of the ground, slithering toward Kaze with his jaw snapping.  
Kaze stood his ground, and the Eye of Malakai swept in front of him to hover just below eye level. 'All right, time to see what this thing can do,' the evon thought, his chest tightening as he quickly ran through his options.  
It was about that time that he came to a very startling and unsettling realization, and he grimaced as he stared at the translucent yellow sphere before him. 'I really should have asked Risal how to use this thing.'  
"SHRAAAUGH!!" The earth dragon roared as he approached at high speed, ignoring desperate volleys of weak energy beams being fired at him by the two remaining paladin as he advanced.  
Just as Kaze was about to give up on the Eye and try his mundane magic, Saima stepped in front of him, her palm held up toward the swiftly approaching beast.  
"**White fire burning within, become my lance and slay my foe! SEVERUS ALPHA!**" Glowing white runes appeared in a circle around her hand and briefly rotated before they collapsed into a single sphere of bright white mana.  
"Uh? GRAAAAH!!" A bright flash was the only other warning the dragon got before it was speared in the mid-section by a thick lance of magical energy, causing an explosion of hot blood out of its side as the force of the spell stopped the dragon dead in its tracks.  
Kaze gaped as the bishop lowered her hand and let out a tired sigh. "B-B-Bishop... that was... that was amazing..." he stuttered, so in awe that he reverted to using a title of respect. 'To focus a magic bolt powerful enough to cause such a wound on a dragon... the mana requirement must be enormous!'  
Ignoring the angelic paladin that was hovering behind him, the earth dragon hissed at the elven woman, glaring hatefully as his blood pooled on the ground. "You'll pay for that, elf ssscum!"  
"Begone lizard, before I manage to recall some of my more dangerous spells," Saima muttered dismissively. "We are not easy prey. If we do not have what you seek, you'd best leave while you only have one hole in you."  
Then she whispered behind her. "Toren! Can't you do something? I can't possibly kill this beast by myself!"  
Kaze sweatdropped. "What am I supposed to do? I've been in very few life-and-death battles before; it's a little early in my career to start slaying dragons!"  
A vein popped up on Saima's head. "You useless brat! Hurry up and run away then! Me and Chiima will hold it here!" Then she shouted to the monk and other paladin, both of whom had frozen in fear and indecision at the sight of the monster. "You two make a run for it! We'll deal with this!"  
"You'll die like dogsss!" The dragon snarled, idly whipping his head about to ward off an attack from Chiima. Then he started forward toward the bishop.

Kaze cursed and turned away, noting that the metadragon also seemed to be fleeing the battle (and rightfully so). Having his path back to the city blocked, the priest elected to follow the smaller draconian, reasoning that he may already have a good hiding place in mind. 'I wish I could do something to help rather than run... but what? I don't have any spells that can hurt a dragon!'

"Die, foolsss!" The dragon roared, slithering at high speed toward the elven woman who stood firmly in his path.  
Saima snorted and pressed her hands together, as if in prayer. "**Lord of Judgment, cast your wrath upon those who would strike down your servants! Orb of Retribution!**" Summoning as much power as she could to herself, the elf formed a bubble of bright blue energy around her. 'I can only pray it's powerful enough to stun a dragon,' she thought bleakly to herself, 'the shield will block any incoming attacks and strike a severe, paralyzing shock against all who touch it, but I'm not sure it will work on something with a dragon's magic resistance. If it doesn't, I can forget about a counter-attack...' Steeling herself against the oncoming beast, she held her ground firm, bracing herself for the impact as the azure barrier shined before her.  
The impact never came, and Saima's eyes widened as the dragon curved wide around her, avoiding her and her barrier in direct pursuit of the fleeing evon.  
"Hey! No! You! You come back here!" Saima shouted impotently, shaking her fist at the departing serpent.  
Chiima passed over her head and pointed at the dragon in a panic. "It's no good! He's heading straight for the avatar!"  
"I noticed!" Saima shouted, letting her barrier fall as she tried to summon another spell. "Toren! Look out!"

The earth dragon snickered to himself as he closed with his target, having heard the pitiful shouting from the elven cleric behind him. 'Foolish woman. As if I would throw myself upon her magics when there is more bountiful prey about.'  
Despite the mental assertion, he sensed the bishop of Malakai charging up another spell, and seeing how the first one she had thrown had been a doozy, decided that the spellcaster required more attention.  
"**Chains that bind the unworthy! Entwine and crush those who would defy your punishment! Chains of Judgment!**" Saima called out desperately, throwing out her hand as a large circle of glowing runes appeared in front of the dragon in preparation to stop him.  
Once again the elf was caught off-guard as the dragon suddenly veered away, curving around so that he could face the enemies behind him.  
Saima's eyes filled with dread as she noticed the sickly green glow within the creature's mouth, recognizing what was about to take place.  
_SHOOM!_ A thick green beam of energy blasted from the dragon's mouth, and Saima barely managed to leap out of the way as the magic blast smashed into the area she had occupied bare seconds before.  
Immediately she scrambled to her feet so that she could gain distance from the impact point; while she thought it strange that there had been no initial explosion, she couldn't imagine that an energy beam of that size didn't have a radius of impact effect, whatever that effect might be. A quick glance behind her confirmed her fears, as she watched the green energy quickly disperse and sink into the ground, spreading from the impact point much faster than she was running from it.  
"Bishop! Hang on!" Chiima shouted, grabbing hold of the elven woman and flapping his wings powerfully to lift both of them off the ground.  
_Kroom! Kroom! Kroom!_ The angel thanked the elder gods that elves were generally extremely frail and thus appropriately feather-light as huge, spiked crags of rock and crystal burst from the ground below, each one stretching several meters out of the earth before stopping dead, bits of dirt and crumbling rock sliding off their jagged spires.

Distantly, the dragon snorted as he watched the angel effect a rescue, and triggered a mental command. Immediately, the crags began to glow red, and angry crimson cracks suddenly appeared all over the patch of deadly rock.  
_Boom! Boom! Kaboom! Boom!_ One by one, in increasing frequency, the spires detonated, launching bursts of stone shrapnel and hot dust into the air.  
The earth dragon snickered as the paladin and bishop both disappeared within the symphony of explosions, and then turned away. 'Now, to return to the hunt...'  
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Hey! Wait up!" Kaze shouted, still running as he glanced at the distant explosions.  
K craned his head to look behind him. "Huh? Hey, what're you doing? Shouldn't you be back there helping your friends?"  
"What am I supposed to do? I'm a self-taught amateur spellcaster and cleric! I don't have any spells strong enough to faze a dragon, and talismans won't work either!" Kaze complained, catching up to the flying beast and keeping pace. "Besides, it looks like it's coming after me, not them!"  
A sound of an energy beam from far behind them attracted their attention, and K and Kaze both glanced behind them just in time to watch Chiima and Saima disappear in a barrage of explosions.  
Kaze winced. "Ooh... uh... they'll probably survive that, right?"  
K turned back forward, putting more energy into his escape. "Probably. They were in the air, and if that elf has more to her than a mean magic lance, she can pull off a good landing." Then he looked behind him, annoyed. "So why are you following me, exactly? I'm pretty much the only living thing in a five-mile radius he WOULDN'T want to kill, and you're kind of spoiling that."  
"Don't you have someplace to hide, or a shelter or something?" Kaze asked, swallowing nervously as he saw that the snake-like dragon had continued pursuit.  
"How can I hide with you and that damn gem?" K shouted, "That orb floating behind you is some kind of nuclear mana reactor or something! He can sense that thing from over a mile away!"  
"What? Are you serious?" Kaze asked in alarm, mentally moving the Eye so that it floated in front of him.  
"Yes, I'm serious! Ditch it, man!" K yelled angrily.  
"You're out of your mind!" Kaze yelled with equal heat. "This is a sacred heirloom of the Order! The holy symbol of the fourth avatar's badge of office! MY badge of office!"  
"If you're a freakin' avatar, do something avatarish and whoop that thing!" K said, a vein popping up on his head.  
"I can't!" The evon cried, "I'm new at this!"  
"You're useless!"  
"So I've heard!"

K grimaced as he heard the earth dragon roar furiously behind them. 'Okay, think! You've only got one place to go; back to Ranma and Rayden! I hate to ask Ranma to jump in and save me like this, especially with Rayden injured, but I don't have a choice!'  
The metadragon flapped his wings harder, trying to pick up speed as he saw the earth dragon gaining. 'Problem: that damn overgrown wyrm will be on us in less than a minute! And when we reach the cliff, what's this dork supposed to do? Jump?'  
"Hey, evon!" K shouted, getting the priest's attention. "Good luck finding your way down! I'm sure not carrying you!"  
Kaze felt a deep sense of dread sink into his stomach as the canyon ledge swiftly approached, and he finally realized where the metadragon had been heading. 'Makes perfect sense, I suppose... after all, he can fly, and an earth dragon, naturally, can't follow flying opponents very far... but where does that leave me?'  
Kaze slowed to a jog and then to a complete halt as he reached the edge, and he saw the metadragon shake his head sadly as he dipped into the canyon below, protected as he was from the rigors of gravity.  
The evon frowned as he turned his head. The earth dragon had slowed slightly, recognizing that its prey was trapped, and that there was no need to maintain a chase speed.  
'I will NOT die like this!' Kaze vowed, gritting his teeth. 'If there's always been one thing I've been good at, it's been getting out of a jam with my skin intact. I need to stop trying to think like a hero and go back to thinking like a young, two-bit rogue.'  
Nodding at his decision, Kaze reached out and grasped the Eye of Malakai between his hands. Then he shook it violently, gritting his teeth. "HEY!! Ancient magic power! A little HELP here? I didn't lug you around with me... well, I didn't lug you around at all, technically, but... DAMMIT, **DO** SOMETHING!!"

The approaching dragon raised an eyebrow as he saw his next meal stop and frown at him, and then he sweatdropped as he watched the evon grab the magical item and yell at it furiously.  
'Stupid priests. They never realize that they can't rely on their pathetic gods to save them until it's too late.'  
Speeding up for a final lunge, the earth dragon opened its maw, preparing to crush the evon between rows of sword-like teeth.  
_Shoom!_  
The dragon's mouth was still open when Kaze suddenly vanished in a bright flash of light, and it didn't close immediately as the serpent slowly slid to a stop at the edge of the cliff.  
'What... where... how?' Closing his mouth, the dragon frowned at the spot where the evon had vanished. Experimentally, he whipped his tail around through the area that the man had occupied. When no battered body or spray of blood materialized, he was satisfied that the priest was truly gone, rather than merely invisible.  
'Impossible... that must have been a teleportation... but to teleport on the spot, with no incantation, magic circle, nexus, or magic terminal... wait, the sphere! Perhaps it was a teleport key!'  
Stretching out his own magical senses, the earth dragon was baffled to find the object and victim he sought down in the canyon below, and that it was still running away from his position at a fairly good clip for a mortal biped.  
'He teleported down there? That doesn't make sense... unless... a blink spell?' The dragon scoffed as he quickly dove into the ground, tunneling through dirt and rock to reach the valley floor below without suffering the disastrous effects of gravity.  
'Blink spells are only possible for the most learned of magi! How did that useless cleric know it? It isn't a specialty of Malakai's cronies, is it?'  
As he pondered the specifics of Kaze's escape, the earth dragon's specially tuned senses measured the precise extent of the vibrations caused by his travel through the ground, and formed in his mind a perfect picture of the shape, location, and distance of the canyon wall.  
'Perhaps I'll ask the priest about the spell before I kill him,' he pondered.  
_Ka-kroom!_ The earth dragon's head burst out of the side of the canyon wall, and he immediately caught sight of his prey fleeing down the canyon floor.  
'Ha! Talk to him before killing him! I crack myself up!' Taking a moment to cackle to himself, the draconic hunter slithered forward.

"You teleported down?" K asked incredulously as he flew alongside the fleeing evon. "That doesn't make sense... unless... a blink spell?"  
"It would seem so!" Kaze shouted in-between breaths, fighting to keep up as the constant running began to take its toll.  
"Blink spells are only possible for the most learned of magi! How does a useless cleric like you know it? It isn't a specialty of Malakai's cronies, is it?"  
A vein popped up on Kaze's head. "Who're you calling a crony? Besides, I'm actually quite an effective mage! It's not my fault that one of my first opponents was a bloody serpent king!"  
A distant explosion announced the dragon's exit into the valley, and they both winced.  
"Well, let's see if I can do that again..." grabbing the floating yellow sphere, Kaze concentrated briefly, focusing on a point several meters ahead.  
_Shoom!_ After a moment of severe disorientation, he found himself in the appropriate place, and smiled.  
"Yes! With this I can easily match that dragon's speed!" Concentrating once more, Kaze mapped out several points ahead, remembering that one of the main principles of the blink spell was supposed to be catastrophic unreliability when used over longer distances (and when it came to the disintegration and reformation of a person's entire body, reliability was a key issue).  
_Shoom! Shoom! Shoom!_  
"Hey! Wait up!" K shouted irritably, glancing behind him and noting that he was now falling into the middle of the chase. 'I have half a mind to fly out of here and leave him! Jerk...'  
_Shoom!_ Kaze completed his first series of phasing teleports, and was pleased with his progress as he looked back. "Excellent! I could do this all day!"  
He grabbed the Eye again, staring at a point on the cliff above. "I'll just phase up there and then keep using it until I get back to Taer'Kul! Easy!"  
There was a long silence as he continued staring at the point.  
"Hey! No! Don't you stop working now!" He shouted angrily, shaking the Eye of Malakai again. "Damnation! What's wrong with this thing? Is it out of power? Does it take batteries? Souls? Prayer? What?"  
_Whoosh!_ "Hey, biped! Better start moving again!" K said as he passed the troubled evon.  
"Why didn't anyone give me an instruction manual for this thing?" Kaze complained as he took off once again at a sprint. "This is ridiculous! We can't possibly outrun an earth dragon! Where are we heading?"  
K resisted the urge to remind the man following him that HE could easily fly out of the earth dragon's reach, and that he was only taking this route for the evon's benefit. "Don't worry! My friend isn't far from here! He can help!"  
"Your... friend?" Kaze immediately began conjuring images in his mind of even larger dragons, clad from head to toe in gleaming metal carapaces and sheltering crowds of men and women under their steel wings.  
Given that, he was terribly disappointed when he realized they were headed toward a single man crouched behind a campfire, poking at the embers.

"Ranma! There you are! Thank the Gods!" K gasped as he managed a clumsy landing in front of the campfire. "There's an-"  
"Earth dragon chasing you, right?" Ranma asked, looking up from his fire.  
At the metadragon's questioning gaze, Ranma pointed behind them. "I'm not blind, and it's not like he was far behind."  
Kaze and K sweatdropped. They had gained a good bit of distance while the dragon was busy tunneling underground, but the earth dragon was still racing down the straight length of the canyon floor, less than a kilometer behind.  
"I know you don't like fighting dragons," K pleaded, "but this is an emergency! This guy and his party got ambushed and-"  
"Don't worry about it," Ranma said suddenly, getting up lazily and stretching his neck. "I've got it covered."  
Kaze's eyes widened. "'Got it covered'? Against a dragon?"  
"Uh... yeah. Are you sure? You weren't nearly so confident about it last time," K asked uncertainly.  
Ranma gave the others a sidelong stare. "Well, unless you plan on outrunning it, I don't really have a choice, do I? Get back."  
Stepping forward, Ranma glared at the oncoming serpent, and then drew the pistol at his hip.

Kaze sweatdropped. "A gun? He thinks he's going to kill a dragon with a gun?"  
K frowned. "I don't think so... you shouldn't underestimate this guy. He knows what he's doing. And he's tricky. He nearly killed a snow dragon by himself just by fooling her over and over again."  
"Hmm..." Kaze considered this. "I can appreciate the value of wit and deceit, but I'd much rather you found someone of incomparable strength to defend us."  
"Sorry, that guy's still injured," K murmured. "Besides, beggars can't be choosers."  
"Point taken."

Slipping the pistol into his left hand, Ranma then raised his right, turning the gauntlet that covered it so that the gem set in the back of the hand gleamed in the mid-day light.  
"Hey, scaly! You want this?"  
The dragon stopped dead, and its eyes narrowed as it stared hard at the human standing in its path.  
Then it charged forward, its body shifting to move in a sidewinder's screw-like fashion. Huge coils of muscle and sharp stone-like scale ridges tore apart rock and dirt that lay in the beast's path, and Kaze and K both gulped and started to step back as they witnesses the maelstrom of grinding destruction that was advancing toward them.  
Ranma remained unfazed, and slowly raised his Nighthawk up toward the oncoming dragon...  
And then kept raising it upward until it pointed into the air, much to his friends' further confusion and panic.  
_Blam!_ Ranma shot a single bullet into the air, smirking as the dragon continued his approach.  
The dragon, for his part, wondered what kind of foolishness would encourage a human to find an immortal monster of supreme power charging at him and respond by wasting the ammunition of his already pitifully underpowered weapon.  
Sadly for the ancient beast, he didn't think to extend his magical senses to sense traps in the area. Or take a moment to check for explosives. Or use any one of his enhanced senses to notice demons hiding in rock crevices charging up lethal sword strikes, ready for the ambush. And even if he had, it would have been too late.  
"**VENOM STRIKE!!**" Rayden yelled, jumping out of the small hole upon hearing the gunshot. Slicing downward in a high arc to extend the length of the cut as far as possible, the dark greatsword trailed black lightning as it sliced through the dragon's rock-like carapace with ease, the normally invulnerable scales offering little resistance before the awesome power of Darkrune.  
Kaze watched in awe and horror as a great spray of blood accompanied the severing of the dragon just below the neck, and he grimaced as the snake-like form collapsed onto the ground, all its speed translating into dead momentum that kicked up large gouts of dust as the large coil of flesh and scales fell.  
"That... That was incredible..." he gasped. Below him, K nodded in mute agreement, not quite so enthralled to see one of his own kind so brutally dispatched.  
Ignoring the evon's comment, Ranma walked forward toward the dragon's head, which was still gaping and snapping its jaws while trying to conjure screams of agony. The lack of access to its lungs made the effort useless, and merely made the dying beast look more pathetic as its neck and head writhed helplessly.  
Small motes of red light began to gather around Ranma's left hand, and as he balled that hand into a fist, it suddenly blazed red with supernatural flames.  
"**Dragon fist!**" Ranma shouted, dashing forward and unleashing the blow into the dragon's jaw.  
_KRA-KOOM!_ Kaze stood stunned as he watched a dragon's head of flame plow into the dragon's head of flesh, resulting in the latter being blown away and smashing into the canyon wall. The resulting tremors from the impact caused several rock crags and pockets of loose dirt to tumble down, and the evon watched numbly as the pitiful creature was thinly buried underneath its elemental birthright.

Rayden snickered as he watched Ranma deliver the final blow. "Overkill. Nice." Then he turned and planted Darkrune firmly into the dead body of the dragon, at which point the blade began to absorb the dragon's blood to fill its own reserves of power.  
Leaving his blade to feed, the dark paladin approached his team leader, looking extremely pleased. "Man, you were right! They're WAY easier to kill when we do it that way!"  
"Yup. Tactics make most things easier. That's why I'm the leader," Ranma explained, patting Rayden on the back. "Brute force, near-invulnerability, and deadly magic is all well and good, but it really won't amount to anything if you're not smart about using it."  
Rayden sighed. "Yeah, I know. The other Dread Knights and the priests are always saying the same thing. But it's not easy, you know?"  
"Obviously, I don't know," Ranma said condescendingly, "or else I wouldn't have survived as long as I have. Anyway, just stick with me and you should do fine."

Despite the fact that the two warriors clearly hadn't finished their after-battle reflection, at this point the earth dragon's intended victims decided to cut in.  
"You sneaky bastard!" K said, smirking as he jumped up and landed on Ranma's shoulder. "You were already prepared for him!"  
Ranma smirked back. "Yeah. Now do you see what I mean when I talk about facing an enemy on my terms? Makes all the difference."  
"That was incredible!" Kaze said excitedly, finally drawing the swordsmens' attention to him. "That attack! Such an enormous concentration of dark energy! I've never seen anything like it!"  
Ranma frowned. "Oh. Right. K? Who's this guy?"  
"I dunno. His party got ambushed and he followed me down here. I have no idea who he is," the metadragon said dismissively.  
"I do," Rayden growled.  
Kaze nodded happily. "Yes, yes! We met in Taer'Kul! I'm so glad that that whole lynching incident was taken care of without anyone getting hurt! My name is-GRK!" The evon's introduction was cut short as Rayden grabbed him around the neck and lifted him into the air, glaring at him with eyes that briefly glowed crimson.  
"Someone DID get hurt, priest. I DID," the Dread Knight said hatefully, tightening his grip.  
"Whoa, whoa, take it easy, Ray!" Ranma insisted, tapping Rayden on the back. "So what if you got hurt? You're okay now, right? I've hurt you too, remember?"  
"He splashed holy water in my face!" Rayden shouted.  
"Tha' wush a' assidenk!" Kaze mumbled as best he could with his throat moments away from being crushed utterly.  
"NOBODY splashes holy water in my face and gets away with it!" Rayden growled.  
"Uh, Ranma did. And he TOTALLY got away with it," K said, sweatdropping.  
_Thwack!_ Ranma slapped K off his shoulder, then turned back toward Rayden. "Okay, fine, so the guy hurt you bad, and from what I'm piecing together, probably made you look like a total wuss in front of a crowd. But you're not allowed to kill him."  
"Aw! Why not?" Rayden complained.  
"Because I said so," Ranma said firmly. "You can slam him around a bit, but I don't want any major bones broken. Also, try and finish up quickly, all right? You still have to chop up the dragon and package what we're saving for later.  
Kaze twitched as Rayden grumbled incoherently, aware that his situation had not improved overly much from being chased by a bloodthirsty monster. At the very least, however, the demon holding him had loosened his grip, allowing him to speak more easily.  
"Wait! I'm sorry for earlier! I was trying to help you!" the evon shouted desperately.  
Rayden grinned remorselessly as he balled one hand into a fist. "If I'd wanted help, you would have known, because I would have been crying like a little girl while screaming 'Help me! Help!' But I didn't do that, did I?"  
"That isn't... but..." Kaze struggled helplessly for a moment, then he frowned. "Well... in that case, there's really only one more argument left to make."  
With a short mental command, the Eye of Malakai (which Ranma and Rayden had largely ignored up until now) suddenly swung forward around Kaze's head, smacking sidelong into Rayden's skull.  
The dark paladin merely glared at the sphere, largely unscathed, then he slapped it away with his free hand.  
"What did you think that was supposed to do?" Rayden asked angrily, raising the evon up higher and then shaking him powerfully.  
_Poof!_ Immediately the form that Rayden had mistaken for Kaze disappeared in a puff of smoke, and Rayden blinked as he stared at the lone paper talisman that slowly floated down to the ground.  
"The hell?" He mumbled, grabbing the paper so that he could read it.  
_G-ZZZAAAAK!!_ "BWAUGH!!"

Ranma winced as the spell talisman activated upon being touched, and then turned to Kaze, who was standing next to him and massaging his throat.  
"Of course you realize he'll have to hurt you even more now," Ranma said neutrally.  
Kaze winced as Rayden slowly teetered back and forth, stunned but still conscious. "Please, I wish to make an appeal to you! Allow me to join you!"  
Ranma and Rayden blinked in surprise.  
"What? Why should we let YOU join?" Rayden asked as he dusted himself off, not nearly as upset about being electrocuted as the others had expected.  
"That's issue number two, actually," Ranma corrected, crossing his arms over his chest. "My first question is: why would you WANT to travel with us? We don't know you, and the only one of us you've met was the psycho dark knight from an evil warrior cult."  
"He doesn't seem that bad to me," Kaze reasoned.  
"Not the point," Ranma asserted. "We'll get to how you get along with Rayden later. Answer the question, please."  
"It's a simple enough reason," Kaze explained, "as an avatar of the Order of Malakai, I'm expected to lead entire armies on grand crusades of liberation and conquest into generally dark, nasty places where only the foulest and most sadistic of demonic beasts reside." Then he pointed to the dragon. "As you've probably guessed by now, my skills hardly measure up to those expectations, and so I've departed on a quest to expand my experience and sharpen my skills."  
"Are you done with your life story yet?" Ranma asked, looking bored. "I asked why you wanted to travel with US."  
"Of course. After seeing you dispatch a dragon, which my previous company and myself was nearly helpless against, I'm convinced that you're the perfect group for me to assist to put my skills to the test and gain new ones!"  
Ranma raised an eyebrow, then rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "Okay... I'll be frank with you; you've got a couple things goin' for ya. First of all, for a priest, you're not really preachy, and you haven't started making demands and then insisting we do what you say because you're some kind of big shot."  
Kaze nodded smugly. "Humility is well-known to me, and I've seen my share of the streets and lower-class lifestyles. It's the wilderness that has been largely denied to me in my training as a priest."  
"How's that work?" Rayden asked curiously. "Don't they train Malakai priests to be battle clerics?"  
"Most of the time," Kaze explained, "though on occasion an influential priest may use his influence to have his son raised exclusively as one of the civilian ecclisiarchy, kept out of warzones, and trained only in utilitarian magic." His voice took on a bitter edge. "Most of my skills don't come from formal training, and I was punished frequently for practicing combat magic against my father's wishes."  
"Okay, now there're two things I don't get," Ranma murmured. "One, if you're supposed to be some kind of hero, how could your dad keep you from being trained, and two, if you're supposed to be kept out of warzones and dangerous places, what the hell are you doing in the wastes on Earth realm?"  
"To answer your first question, I wasn't avatar until yesterday," Kaze explained, "and as for the second, after the Death March was over, I managed to call in several favors and then coerced a few more to be officially transferred here. I wanted to see the humans' technology and escape the sphere of my father's influence so that I didn't have to keep kowtowing to my family's expectations."  
"'Coerced,' huh?" K said suspiciously. "You don't sound like a very good priest."  
"Honestly, I'm not," Kaze admitted shamelessly. "I gamble, drink, and regularly sleep with women I hardly know. I cheat whenever I think I can get away with it, and despite my obviously limited and low-key experience, I love a good fight. In fact, the only cases in which I actually uphold the creed I've been taught are during the most dramatic examples of subjugate evil, or if doing so explicitly benefits me at the time."  
The others stared at the evon expressionlessly, none of them being prepared by such a barrage of honest admission.  
Rayden was the first to recover, turning toward Ranma. "I'd say that's another point in his favor."  
"Huh. Oh well; as long as you're not a preacher." Ranma mumbled, causing K to sweatdrop. "But now that we're past why you want to join us, there's the problem of us not wanting you to join. Another party member, especially one without survival training, means a slower pace, tighter resources, and another backstory full of colorful characters that may come and try to hunt us all down for being associated with you." He stared suspiciously at the evon. "No offense, but the way you described yourself, you seem like the type of guy with a lot of enemies, and between me and Rayden we may not be able to handle much more. What can you bring to the table?"  
Clearing his throat purposefully, Kaze stood up straight and grasped the Eye of Malakai in his hand.  
_Vwoom!_ Immediately, the yellow sphere glowed brightly, and a shaft of similarly colored light emerged from the bottom and twisted itself downward, quickly reaching the ground. After a moment, the glow receded from the extension of light, revealing a gleaming, straight shaft that resembled polished bronze in color.  
Everyone present stared at the gem-turned-staff curiously. Including Kaze.  
"This guy is SO in," Rayden said, quite impressed.  
"That wasn't what he meant to do, you idiot," Ranma said. Then he turned back toward the evon. "Go on, get on with it."  
"Er, yes. Right!" Kaze stared at the staff in his hand consideringly, then shrugged. It HAD been giving him a slight headache to keep the Eye aloft all this time with his telekinetic powers. "Well, besides possessing an artifact of penultimate power that I haven't quite gotten the hang of using-"  
"We've already got enough artifacts of penultimate power that we can barely use," Ranma interrupted, gesturing to his glove, and then jabbing a thumb at the greatsword that was still embedded in the earth dragon's corpse. "Frankly, I'm a little concerned at this point that having so much uncontrollable magic power in one spot will cause a tremendous explosion, or cause the Earth to implode or something."  
"Ah... uh... would it help if I mentioned that the chances of that are quite nil?" Kaze said, sweatdropping. "I DO have a good understanding of basic magical law as well as some of the advanced magic theory..."  
"Huh. That could come in handy. Go on..."  
"Psychic abilities, a fair library of spells, even if I'm short of practice, spell talismans that I picked up from a priestess long ago in my home realm, a number of effective clerical spells..." he began ticking off his talents on his fingers.  
"How many of those clerical spells involve blowing things up? 'Cause we pretty much have that covered," Ranma asked, interrupted once again.  
"Not nearly enough, really," Kaze sighed. "Most have to do with things like detecting magic, demons, spells, traps, materializing elementals, binding spirits, repelling the undead, healing, setting traps, utilizing clairvoyance, and other useless things like that."  
Ranma was silent for several moments as he digested all of this. Then he planted his hands on his hips and gave Rayden a flat stare. "And YOUR only skill was **cooking**?"  
"Hey! Gimme a break; I just killed a freakin' dragon!" Rayden said defensively. "All MY training involved destroying things and surviving hardships that would crush mortal men!"  
"Which is precisely the type of experience I need at the moment," Kaze said eagerly. "While I may have a range of useful skills, the ones I'm most in need of are those involved in the complete, efficient obliteration of one's enemies; skills you possess in spades." With that explanation, Kaze placed his staff on the ground and then kneeled, lowering his head and closing his eyes. "Please, I beg you! Allow me to serve under you as your apprentice! Servant, even! Through my services to you during your journey, I just know I'll be able to overcome my weaknesses and become a worthy servant of my god!"

Ranma frowned deeply, rubbing his chin. Then he began to pace back and forth in front of the kneeling evon. "Well, I admit you do have a lot going for you; you have a lot of skills that we don't have, and you want to learn the skills we do have. You're obviously smart, and have a lot of common sense. You also don't make a big deal about Ray being a demon knight, which I find pretty weird, but I appreciate anyway." Then he turned Rayden and K, the latter of whom had perched on the former's shoulder. "Well, what do you guys think?"  
"He's totally in," Rayden said, giving his leader a thumbs-up.  
K sweatdropped. "Really? You were about to throttle him a few minutes ago."  
"Whatever. All is forgiven. That staff trick was awesome!"  
Ranma and Kaze joined K in sweatdropping. The pigtailed man turned back toward the evon. "You can see why being smart is kind of a big deal around here."  
"Indeed. I hope I can meet your expectations, Master... uh..."  
"Ranma. Ranma Saotome," the pigtailed man said, puffing up slightly at being called "master". "This is Rayden Shikodan, who you've already met; he's the group's powerhouse berserker and meat shield. The little guy is K. He doesn't do much except eat our metal supplies and talk a lot."  
The metadragon twitched, but said nothing.  
"You have such... honest opinions of your companions' skills," Kaze said uncertainly, wondering why Rayden looked so proud at being called the "meat shield".  
"Apparently Ray can cook too, which is also worth mentioning seeing as how we were planning on chopping that dragon up for steaks after his sword finishes sucking the blood out of it. You in?"  
Kaze, apparently being slightly more sensitive to the presence of a dragon about, gave K a wary glance.  
The metadragon merely snorted in disgust, turning away. Kaze took this as a sign that the various ethical forces had already been discussed, and then properly discarded.  
"He can prepare dragon meat? Of course I'm in!" The evon said happily.  
"Cool. Nice to have you aboard. What was your name, again?"  
"Kaze. Kaze Toren, Avatar of Malakai."  
_Dum da da-dum!_ Kaze Toren has joined the party!  
Rayden, who had just began to hack apart the fallen dragon, frowned as he looked around curiously. "Seriously, what IS that, and where did it come from?"  
"I don't know what you're talking about Ray. Just get to cooking."

Kaze sweatdropped slightly as he picked up his staff, but smiled. 'Yes, I imagine that my finding this group so soon after the fragile illusion cast by my newfound status was shattered was no accident.'  
Looking determined, he planted his staff into the ground and began to roll up his sleeves so that he could help. 'This is the beginning of a new chapter of my life! No longer am I Kaze the miscreant weasel! No longer am I Kaze the archbishop's son! From this point forward, I strive to be known far and wide as Kaze the champion of Malakai, first among the greatest priests of Earth realm!'  
Despite his inspiring inner monologue, the evon hesitated a moment later, frowning suddenly.  
'Hmmmm... for some reason, I feel like I'm forgetting something...'  
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_Bam!_ "Help! Quickly!" Saima shouted, causing men and women to stumble in surprise as she burst into the main hall of the Church of Sayg's cathedral. "I need a light lancer squadron at once! Mounted on flyers if possible! Please!"  
"Bishop Saima!" An elven bishop said in concern, recognizing the woman immediately. "Calm down! What's this about? Oh! You're injured!"  
Indeed, the elven woman sported a deep gash on her leg and some smaller cuts on her arms, but otherwise just looked rather dirty and bloodstained. "It's nothing! I need the lancers deployed as quickly as you can! And a healer for my paladin escort! He's waiting outside, but he's hurt worse than I am!"  
"I'll have you healed at once," the other elf said, gesturing sharply to one of the priestesses waiting at his side, snapping her out of her stunned daze. "But why do you need light lancers? If it's a dragon attack, our squadrons are already deployed to-"  
"You don't understand! The avatar is still out there! He was being pursued by the beast when me and Chiima were wounded!"  
The bustle and whispers in the cathedral that had erupted at Saima's entrance fell dead.  
The bishop frowned. "Wouldn't an avatar be able to hold his own? I mean, he should at least be able to escape back here alive."  
Saima grunted as a priest took her arm and began to chant the incantations to heal her injuries. "One would imagine so, but... well, has anyone here ever MET the avatar?"  
"I have," one human paladin offered, raising her hand. "Kaze Toren, right? Yeah, I know him."  
Saima gave the woman a sidelong glance, then slowly raised an eyebrow.  
The paladin blushed badly, causing many of her associates to also give her questioning glances.  
'Ugh. I guess she knows HOW I know him... it's such a pain living among so many psychics, sometimes. No privacy at all.' Forcing herself to adopt a more dignified expression, she accounted for Kaze's experience. "I'd have to agree that he couldn't possibly combat a dragon himself, given his lack of proper training and wilderness experience. Though I certainly believe he could get away unscathed."  
"Hmmm... I see," the bishop looked slightly condescending as he mumbled to himself, and Saima winced; unlike the avatars of Malakai, Sayg's three avatars were each heroes among champions long before they took up the holy artifacts of their stations. Even Chiima would have seemed like a joke to them.  
The elven man sighed. "Very well then. I'll have some telepaths relay a message to the light lancers in the field. Do you have the dragon's approximate location and type?"  
"Yes! It was an earth dragon approximately nine kilometers north, near the winding canyon!"  
"I'll see to it that a full search commences immediately. In the meantime, why don't you get some rest..."  
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Sir? We're hunting an earth dragon now?" One of the silver-armored knights asked the squad leader, who nodded sharply in response.  
"Yes! A party belonging to the Order was ambushed just south of the canyon; only one of them was killed in the attack, but one was forced to flee away from the city and was pursued. If we arrive in time, we're to save him."  
"Sir!" The soldier leaned forward atop his horse, and the lead paladin spurred his horse to a gallop, moving the entire squad across the rocky plains toward the ambush point.  
"Keep your ears sharp for tremors! Watch for scars in the ground! Lances down!" The paladin shouted, holding his own magitech crystal lance down and deactivated.  
Within minutes they approached one segment of the canyon, and the horsemen slowly pulled their mounts up alongside the cliff, slowing to a trot.  
"We're still a ways from the ambush point; we'll follow the lip of the canyon and keep watch on the bottom; it's possible the priest we're looking for climbed down to seek cover," the leader explained, pointing to lines of observation for his men to take as they traveled.  
"Sir!"  
The paladin jerked his head around sharply, raising his lance in preparation to strike. "What is... hm?"  
He immediately noticed what had caught his subordinate's attention; a single, relatively small two-legged mech was slowly moving along the opposite side of the canyon, easily drawing the squadron's attention. It was jet black, with sharp-angular joints and armor planes, and had several long strips of silvery cloth-like attachments all over its armor that trailed behind it as it moved.  
"What IS that thing?" One of the lancers asked nervously, slowly turning on his crystal lance.  
The paladin held his hand up, causing the man to lower his weapon again. "It's a human device; a 'walker', I believe they're called. I have no idea what one of them is doing here, however..."  
After a few more seconds, the walker's image suddenly shimmered, and the strips glowed dully before a wavy blur suddenly consumed the mech.  
Several of the men jerked the mounts back in surprise.  
"It vanished!"  
"What happened? Do mages man those things?"  
"Calm yourself!" the leader demanded, turning away. "Some of those machines have devices that render them invisible at will; I believe that the pilot was letting us know his intentions are not harmful by allowing us to see his vehicle." He frowned as he turned his mount back around so that he could continue the route. "I don't know what human war machines are doing here, but if they bear no apparent hostile intent, it's not my responsibility to deal with it. We have a mission to complete."  
"Yes sir!"  
"Sir!" The group telepath said, speeding up his horse to reach the lead. "I've received a message saying the squad 4 will be making a run down the canyon themselves! We're to concentrate our search on the land!"  
"Two squads to search for a single survivor? Are we looking for someone important, here?" Another lancer asked.  
"It doesn't matter," the paladin shouted, turning his mount away from the cliff edge. "Another squad just makes the mission easier. We're going-"  
_BR-R-R-RZAK!_  
The light lancers jerked their heads back toward the other side of the canyon, where the noise had come from, and then watched, stunned, as an arc of lightning wound through the air from nowhere and sliced through the air in a wide crescent arc.  
_Gzrt! BOOM!!_ A fiery explosion resulted as the target of the attack became clear, and the cloaked recon mech detonated violently as its generators overloaded.

"What the hell was that?" The squadron leader asked, his lance suddenly raised and activated.  
His subordinates could offer no explanations, but they each raised their lance and activated them, causing the long crystal shafts to pulse with unearthly light.  
"Some kind of... accident, perhaps?" One of the lancers guessed, not being able to see any apparent threat.  
"I'm not positive, but I believe mechanical accidents start INSIDE the machine before blowing it up," the paladin muttered ponderously. "Hmmmmm..."  
_Vwom... Vwom... Vwom..._  
"What in-SIR!! THE GROUND!!"  
Surprised at hearing such a statement when there had been no tremors present, the squad leader glanced down at the ground, and then felt his heart sink into his stomach.  
All around the mounted warriors, white runes appeared on the ground in an ever-widening circle, each successive ring of magical symbols emerging from the earth and then slowly rotating opposite the ring just before.  
His men had already begun to spur on their steeds to clear the area, but as the fifth ring flickered into view, the paladin knew it was too late.  
"This... isn't a dragon's spell," he muttered bitterly, just before a dozen crystal spires tore him apart from below.

_Vwoosh!_ A white cylinder of light heralded Doppler's teleportation before the patch of blood-soaked crystal needles, and the veirheelu planted his lower fists on his hips as he admired his handiwork.  
"Not bad. They'll either blame the IEF for this when they observe the mecha remains, or merely assume it was the work of the dragon they were hunting. Either way, magi won't come to mind."  
Raising one of his upper hands, he muttered a quick incantation, and grinned as he replayed the final moments of the earth dragon's death, as recorded by the rune he had planted on the creature's carapace.  
"Not very informative in an of itself, but it provides some useful implications," Doppler murmured to himself. "Shikodan isn't nearly bright or devious enough to use a simple ambush tactic unless directed to do so; the human must be in charge of the group. And Shikodan doesn't follow anyone who isn't at least as powerful as he is, so he must be extremely formidable as well."  
The veirheelu nodded. While he had gathered some information from the fight in Phoenix Mountain, he had only been able to observe part of the battle; mostly the part in which Rayden killed the arrogant Phoenix king. Rayden, however, was an old subject, and while his development required the occasional status report to keep updated, the dark paladin's skills and power held no surprises for Doppler.  
"This human, though... he bears much more study. That glove that he showed to provoke the dragon to charge; clearly the dragon wanted it specifically, but why? And what's he doing with a metadragon?"  
Doppler clicked his tongue. "Well, I'll have to put a note to increase observation of this one. If he's attracted the Order's attention, then he may be just what I'm looking for to... 'deal' with Yaermon."  
Suddenly, he raised his head, and then smiled. "Ah! The other squadron reached the other trap! Poor, stupid fools." He snickered as he made a gesture in the air, and smirked silently as distant, echoing screams were heard a few seconds later. "Idiot pawns for a weak god. This realm is better off without them."  
With that final judgment, the veirheelu was suddenly bathed in a column of blinding light, and an instant later, vanished.

End Chapter 10


	11. Sand of Fate

Profile Report: Sorcerer Unit Class ME-71

Type: High-resonance combat spellcaster

Class: Sorcerer

Purpose: Coordinating and executing the use of mana-based forces to best support standard technology-based weapons and soldiers in multiple capacities

Subject Base: At present, the neural and cybernetic implants necessary to maximize the benefits of the conversion can only be reliably used on human subjects. Common conjecture and a few preliminary tests suggest that other human-like species such as evon or elves would cause the many mana amplification circuits to overload regularly, ultimately making the necessary implants detrimentary, if not outright deadly, to the subject's health. The subject must have a mana resonance factor of at least 15.4 percent, though observation of the results suggest that a resonance factor of 31 percent, the level commonly accepted as that which separates sorcerers from potential mages, is necessary in order to obtain optimal results.

Project Background: Project Magi Excelsus was the Israeli army's third attempt at using mana to enhance their troops during the Death March, and the only successful one. While the other projects inevitably attempted to generate mana resonance among individuals with little to no potential or imprint magic patterns to maintain beneficial effects at all times, Excelsus alone sought to develop and enhance magic potential that was already present in the selection of volunteers used for the experiments. Effectively, Excelsus found men and women who had the potential to be magi and sorcerers, and brought out that potential with a series of surgical procedures and cybernetic implants in an attempt to eliminate the decades of intensive study and training traditionally required of magi from other realms. The first test subject was Darren Yuvosky, who went through the entire initial implant procedure without rejection or major complications. Although the prototype implants worked, there were many unforeseen problems with utilizing battle magic effectively without proper grounding in the extensive and often unbearably flexible areas of magical law (one problem that was never entirely solved was the tendency of the subject to burn, shred, or otherwise destroy their clothing while casting combat spells. The use of tighter clothing can minimize this problem, but among the female applicants, it is still a source of great distress, and a source of great amusement for their male counterparts). Ultimately, Yuvosky failed to perform effectively in his first battlefield deployment, and was killed in action due to an unforeseen complication in adrenaline and other nervous stimuli interrupting the spellcasting process to a much greater extent than was noted in simulations. Since then, the number of major implants has increased from four to nineteen, and the number of circuits has decreased from forty-three to twenty-one, vastly improving the efficiency of the mana generation systems and minimizing if not eradicating common side effects and complications from the procedures and subsequent training. The finished project schematics that were delivered and are being presently used by the Israeli armed forces allowed for the creation of the ME-71 magi super-soldier, and further attempts to improve upon the schematic or further modify the subjects involved have largely been abandoned thus far. The conversion process for an acceptable volunteer takes on average two weeks to complete, with the rejection rate holding at fifteen percent and only a single recorded incident of major complications as a direct result of the implants (as opposed to the subject using their powers before they're trained and frying themselves like an idiot, which remains at thirty percent). The training procedure to utilize the spell programs lasts less than a year, and it is common for subjects to have limited combat exposure during their on-going training, given the desperate nature of the war which prompted the project.

Effects: Using the cybernetic implants, ME-71s can access several pre-programmed spell patterns far more efficiently and with greater control than a traditionally trained mage can. Safety was originally considered another benefit of the magi soldier over the mage as spell programs don't normally allow for the possibility of a miscast, but further observation of subjects in the field has revealed a disturbing number of accidents that have occurred due to the subjects' (and on many occasions, the programmers') complete ignorance of magical laws that would be second nature to a traditional magi. Additionally, magi soldiers can only learn to cast those spells programmed for them that are within their cability to use effectively, and programming spells is an extremely complicated and often problematic procedure. To that end, simple utilitarian spells that a trainee mage could perform easily are effectively impossible for magi soldiers, as well as complicated pattern spells, such as summoning and teleportation, which the programmers can't unravel to the point of fitting onto a program. However, the advantages of training soldiers to use effective battle magic in a short amount of time rather than utilizing extended training programs that conflict with general combat training are clear.  
There are four classes of spell programs utilized by ME-71 soldiers: Offensive, defensive, medical, and tactical. These spells are further divided into categories depending on their power rank, which determines how powerful a subject has to be in order to utilize a program without activating their burnout prevention implant and falling unconscious. Offensive spells are further categorized by elemental type, as experiments have shown that residual energies that accumulate as a result of the ultimately inefficient energy transmissions from casting spells can conflict with different elemental types catastrophically. As a result, each magi soldier inevitably has an element associated with their offensive spell capabilities.

Personnel: Classified by power rank (with military rank and elemental affinity noted as well), these are the current ME soldiers still alive and on active duty (note that because many of them were created through the course of project Magi Excelsus, less than half are actual ME-71s).  
Rank 5: June Kitinski (General/Light)  
Rank 4: Harry Schwin (Major/Ice), Yale Karowien (Private/Dark), Karen Molsk (Colonel/Ice), David Svenson (Major/Wind)  
Rank 3: Tomas Rothbun (Private/Fire), Gale Rothbun (Sergeant/Light), Harry Tarnstein (Private/Wind), Yuri Schmetz (Captain/Dark), Tema Yashomitsu (Private/Earth), Patricia Reninski (Private/Ice), Brian Thompson (Corporal/Fire), Darren Ganreone (Corporal/Light), Wren Shanowitz (Private/Wind), Gary Schelone (Major/Fire), Janet Marriot (Private/Light), Shawn Nemo (Colonel/Dark), Sven Yorishvitz (Private/Wind)  
Rank 2: Terry Terinski (Private/Earth), Ischvin Steinburg (Corporal/Earth), Mary Schvitz (Private/Wind), Eric Lighter (Corporal/Wind), Kevin Mari (Major/Fire), Clarissa Reninski (Private/Ice)  
Unfortunately, subjects who cannot surpass rank 1 are ultimately considered to have insufficient power to contribute meaningfully as a magi soldier, and are released from the training program, although they are still allowed to contribute their limited ability as a regular soldier, and are still tracked and observed for research purposes.

Israeli Armed Forces data file D-903

Nexus II  
by Black Dragon  
http/ do not own Ranma! There! A real disclaimer! I do not profit off of these works in any way, shape or form! Yet I keep doing it anyway! Dear God, why won't I stop typing?

Chapter 11  
Sands of Fate

"Well now, this is very interesting indeed," Doppler mumbled as he scanned the computer terminal, his lower hands clasped behind his back in his typical "thoughtful scheming" pose.  
Sitting in front of the terminal was a grotesque, withered demon with half a dozen misshapen eyes and two cybernetic arms mounted on its shoulders. It's long, tapered fingers swept over the keyboard with obvious skill, and every once in a while one of the servo arms would reach forward to tap a part of the touch-screen monitor.  
"What's so interesting about the artifact database?" The demon asked in a harsh, scratchy voice. "All it does is remind us how many useful things that idiot Yaermon destroyed for no reason."  
Doppler chuckled condescendingly as he patted the shriveled monster on the head. "Tarmin, Tarmin, Tarmin. You must learn not to be so short-sighted. This database lists the locations in which these artifacts were found, does it not?"  
"Eh? So what?" The demon groaned, immediately getting impatient rather than trying to figure it out for himself.  
"SO, please note that many of the recently acquired artifacts came from the same location." Doppler grinned. "Apparently somebody stumbled upon a magic cache and managed to hide it from the local powers."  
Tarmin snorted savagely and tapped the screen, narrowing the listings to those artifacts found in the aforementioned location. "Yes, a rich magic cache that went up in smoke because that psilor wretch can't follow orders!"  
"Judging from this, the excavation is likely still..." Doppler trailed off as Tarmin continued to work through the list of items, and slowly raised an eyebrow. "Stop."  
Tarmin froze immediately. "What? What'd I do wrong? I didn't do nothing wrong!"  
"Hush," Doppler mumbled as he reached forward and tapped a thumbnail picture on the monitor. As soon as he touched it, the picture expanded on the screen along with the data collected on the selected artifact.  
Tarmin stared at the screen in confusion. The item displayed was a black gauntlet with two blue gems set in the wrist and the back of the hand, which was hardly anything special or significant when one was excavating magical objects that were created before demons and magi came to Earth realm eight years ago.  
"Now this... THIS is interesting..." Doppler whispered, almost to himself. "Most mana tests registered negative... preliminary tests suggested remarkable durability..."  
"What's so special about an unbreakable glove?" Tarmin asked irritably, having read the entire data file already and wanting to get back to work.  
"According to the humans' research, very little," Doppler confessed, backing away from the monitor as he rubbed his chin. "What I find absolutely FASCINATING is that this particular item was apparently deemed fully analyzed and transferred to the secondary storage bunker to await transferal to the U.S. It certainly was not in that bunker at the time the base was destroyed, and I happen to know for a fact that it didn't make it to the U.S. either."  
Tarmin made a twisted expression that one would have likened to a humanoid raising an eyebrow, except that the mutant creature had no eyebrows to speak of. "So then where is it?"  
"It's moving north through Mongolia while doing its best to avoid falling down a dragon's gullet," the veirheelu answered bluntly, clearly amused. "Dashtall has put out several bounties calling for a certain individual's head, and the recovery of this object. He's even gone so far as to dispatch his dragons to search it out."  
"That's stupid," Tarmin groaned.  
"Indeed," Doppler agreed. "However, I would like very much to know how a demon lord learned of an obscure and apparently useless artifact uncovered by a human excavation team, and how a completely unrelated human in turn acquired that item, all without the knowledge of the people holding the artifact in the first place. It would also be nice to find out why the blasted lizard cares so much about something that doesn't seem even remotely dragon-related."  
Tarmin snorted. "Personally, I believe Greken is after the dragon, not the glove. What could be so important about this thing that he's willing to risk the wrath of the Americans and the IEF?"  
"I haven't the slightest," the veirheelu said, shrugging helplessly. "But I sure would like to find out. I think I'll take a little trip down to this dig site. I have the feeling that Dashtall knows something I don't, and I ever do so **hate** that feeling." Smirking, Doppler turned away from the computer terminal, leaving his chief technician to continue working without further interruption.

'Still, the missing link is still the human. What role does he play in this?' the demon lord thought to himself as he exited the main computer lab, making his way through the grand hallways that had once belonged to the noble families of the Phoenix tribe. 'I really don't wish to interfere yet; it seems as if he's moving to confront Dashtall, and that would be a most entertaining affair in itself. However, confronting him first may be my best chance to find out what the gauntlet is, and certainly my best chance to secure it for myself, if I decide it's more valuable than the human.'  
He reached one of the larger double-door rooms, and dusted off his hands as he prepared to enter. 'But first, I'll start from the source.'  
Pushing through the doors without bothering to knock or shout a warning, Doppler quickly gestured to the startled man lying on the huge bed in the back of the opulent bedroom.  
"Demetrius, ready yourself," Doppler demanded in a voice devoid of his normally overly-pleasant tone. "I have a task for you."  
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Ranma took a bite out of his sandwich as he sat huddled behind the rock outcropping, moaning ever-so slightly as he savored the moist, salty meats.  
"Mmmm... _Gulp!_ Man... dragon cold cuts... wow."  
Kaze nodded solemnly in agreement, a lone tear rolling out of his eye as he swallowed the last of his own lunch. "The tenderness that melts in your mouth, fills your stomach and yet leaves you thirsty and wanting more after every bite! It's like someone packed the majesty and wonder of the dragon race in-between two slices of bread and added mayonnaise!"  
Rayden, for his part, didn't seem to appreciate the dramatic flattery of his companions, and kept peeking out from behind the boulder they were using impatiently. "What's taking K so long? He's been gone for nearly an hour!"  
"Whatever. He'll be okay," Ranma insisted, tapping the taller man on the back. "You gotta try this sandwich, it's great!"  
Rayden sweatdropped as he turned to his teammates. "We just had lunch before we found the encampment."  
"Yeah, I know! But it's so good!" Ranma said, rummaging around in his pack for another sandwich.  
Kaze sighed regretfully. "Can you believe we had to leave behind all that meat to rot on the canyon floor? Such a waste..."  
"Well, it was a damn big animal," Ranma reasoned, though clearly he was also regretting it. "And Ray said he got all the best parts..."  
"We'll just have to make do, I guess."  
"Right. Besides, they're sending enough dragons after us that we'll probably kill another one before long, right?"  
The team chef twitched slightly. "Can we stop eating and get back to the matter at hand for a sec?"  
Kaze and Ranma stopped and looked at each other, then nodded seriously.  
"He's right. At this rate we'll run out of dragon soon. I mean, it's only been a couple of days, and we've eaten most of half a ton of meat," Ranma said, rubbing his chin.  
"If by 'we' you mean 'you and Shikodan,'" Kaze murmured, as it had become quickly apparent that the two fighters had the metabolisms to match their strength. "Tsk! We were even going to save some to sell to local traders... but I couldn't possibly sell such exquisite rations. It's agreed then! We should ration it off from now on!"  
"Oh, right, so we all get the same amount of dragon meat when me and Ray eat five times as much? No chance!" Ranma said decisively.  
"It's only fair."  
"It's a crock!"  
Rayden rubbed his forehead and leaned against the boulder, wondering if his companions would even notice if he left while they were arguing about their food.  
A bright flash of light alerted the Dread Knight to a shiny, oncoming object approaching from above, and he snorted as K flew down from the cliff face, flapping his wings rapidly to hover just over their heads.  
"Yo, I'm done!" The metadragon announced, noting that Kaze and Ranma seemed to be engrossed in a heated discussion while Rayden looked annoyed.  
"About time. What're we dealing with?" Rayden asked, itching to get into combat as soon as possible.  
"It's pretty much your average, run-of-the-mill bandit camp, if much bigger. Mostly lizardmen and centaurs. A few evon and juga, too. They probably need that kind of manpower with the Divine Circles so close by," K explained. "They also had a really good watch. I was spotted like a dozen times. Luckily they didn't seem to care about me; I guess I look like a scavenger imp or something from far away."  
"Believe me, distance has nothing to do with it," Rayden said, earning him a irritated glare from the metadragon. "So what're we waiting for? Let's sack some raiders!"  
"Ah-ah-ah!" Kaze said suddenly, disengaging himself from conversing with Ranma so suddenly that it left the pigtailed man disoriented. "One cannot simply barge into a bandit camp and start slaughtering evil-doers, Shikodan!"  
"Eh? Why not?" The Dread Knight asked, clearly surprised by the priest's assertion. "Aren't **you** supposed to be the novice, here?"  
"Novice in combat, perhaps, but I'm not so ignorant of the world to stumble headfirst into such a wasteful mistake!" Kaze asserted, turning toward Ranma. "Master Saotome, tell me, is it not the prerogative of mercenaries such as ourselves to seek some sort of bounty office, or seek a client with which to pay us for our services in risking our well being to rid the world of its violent trash?"  
"Hey! Who're you calling-" Rayden began only to have Ranma slap a hand over his mouth.  
"He's not talking about you, moron." Then he turned toward Kaze. "Well... you're right, I guess..."  
Rayden yanked Ranma's arm away so that he could speak again. "Don't be ridiculous! We've stumbled upon a den of evil that should be exterminated as quickly as possible! Any delay could possibly mean lives lost while we're busy snooping around for someone to pay for what we were planning to do anyway!"  
"Regardless, we would ultimately be doing the most public good by securing payment first to ensure we can afford supplies and remain motivated for our future campaigns against the evils of the world!" Kaze insisted, stamping his staff into the ground and generally looking far more authoritative than the demon staring down at him.

Ranma sweatdropped as he rubbed his forehead, and K flew up behind him to perch on his shoulder.  
"Why is our evil demon knight arguing for a selfless charge into the enemy while our holy priest is trying to make money from the local residents' misfortune?" The metadragon asked conversationally.  
A vein popped up on Ranma's head as he sighed. "Because I didn't learn my lesson after I picked you up and had to invite more losers to follow me around." Then he stepped between the two taller men, hooking his arms behind their necks and forcing them to lean over suddenly.  
"All right kids, just calm down," the pigtailed man muttered irritably, and he was mildly amused at seeing them both stop to pay careful attention to him. "Koz, I know you'd like to catch a bounty here, but as I've already explained before, we're kind of headed somewhere right now, and we don't have time for unnecessary detours. We'll just have to make do with what we can loot from the bandit camp." Rayden made a grunting noise as Ranma dragged his head down even further, so that he was actually below eye level. "Ray, seeing how these guys happen to be in our way and we could do some good by massacring them, we'll be doing things your way for once. But in the future, don't try to disguise your bloodlust as concern for the innocent. You're not fooling anybody, so just cut it out."  
"I can do that," Rayden said obediently.  
Kaze remained silent for a long moment. "... 'Koz'?"  
"Yeah, looks like you've got a nickname, too! Welcome to the team!" Rayden said while grinning, although he still seemed rather awkward while being held in a stooping position.  
The evon blinked, then smiled brightly. "Ah! Yes! I see, it's a gesture of acceptance! Well then, may I refer to you as-"  
"No," Ranma interrupted, yanking Kaze down further. "I'm still Master Saotome. Rayden is still Shikodan. You can call K by his nickname if you want."  
"Hey! Why doesn't he have to address me with respect?" The metadragon protested, fuming.  
"Because you're the only one of us he could beat up, obviously," Rayden reasoned.

Ranma let go of his two companions, then cracked his neck to both sides while resting a hand on his katana. "K, is there anything else we should know before we charge in there?"  
Although still slightly miffed, the young dragon nodded. "Yeah, apparently there's a big commotion on the mountain near the rear of the camp, where some of the bandits make dwellings in a cavern complex. I'm not sure what's going on, but it has the guard in a frenzy; they're on high alert, but there aren't many of them, and they keep rushing around. Now's probably a good time to attack."  
"A big commotion? Well, in a bandit camp there's pretty much only one thing that causes a stir: a fight," Rayden said, unsheathing Darkrune and planting it point-down in the dirt. "Either they're going on a raid, there's some infighting, or someone's raiding them. Well, someone else, I mean."  
Kaze snorted and crossed his arms over his chest as he closed his eyes and tilted his head upward. "Well, judging by the presence of those two oncoming Vulture-class pod fighters, I'd say the camp is being attacked, and furthermore, that the culprit is a human military force."  
Rayden stared at the white priest, amazed. "Whoa... a Vulture-class... your powers can detect all that from here?"  
"Nope," Ranma said, staring upward as the four stubby white aircraft passed overhead, their engine roar following a good five seconds behind them. Kaze sweatdropped and chuckled nervously. "But to his credit, it's pretty impressive that he can identify them at all, never mind from a good distance." Then he hopped up onto the rock they were using as cover, crouching down as he tracked the planes' path of flight. "Huh. The only reason planes like those would be out here would be..." Ranma frowned. "But what's the IEF doing way out here?"  
"Hey! You! You on the rock!" A snarling shout came from the rock outcroppings further down the quarry road, and Ranma turned his head slightly as three guards suddenly emerged, having spotted him immediately and advanced from their posts.  
The apparent leader, a white troll, closed the distance quickly and then swung around a halberd and jabbed it so that it stopped an inch from Ranma's throat. He didn't flinch. "Yeah? Something I can help you with?"  
The troll let out a dusty snort as a grend and a lizardman walked up from behind, scimitars drawn. "Undo your belt and throw your weapons to me, human," the troll hissed. "Then we'll search you for valuables. Depending on how much you have, we may decide to let you live."  
Ranma blinked. "Oh? So you would let me live if I had a lot of money on me?"  
Before the troll could even nod, Ranma's right hand whipped out and grabbed the halberd spike, holding it solidly.  
Ranma frowned as the troll tried to budge his weapon without result. "Wow. Now I feel kinda bad. I mean, we're gonna kill you no matter how much you have, and we're the GOOD guys."  
The grend blinked it long, slanted eyes. "'We'?"  
On cue, Rayden and Kaze stepped out from behind the rock outcropping, both of them holding their weapons in clear preparation for violence.  
Kaze chuckled as he flashed a spell talisman pinched between his fingers. "Well, it appears the tables have turned."  
"Actually, they were pretty screwed the minute they jabbed something sharp at Ranma," Rayden muttered, scratching his nose with his free hand. "So it's more like the table tipped over even more and crushed them, or something."  
The three guard demons all sweatdropped and began to look far more uneasy. The white troll, deciding that he wasn't going to get his halberd back, let go of the weapon and backed away, drawing a short sword that had been strapped to his long, spindly legs.  
"Well, no need for introductions, I guess." Ranma tossed away the long weapon, and then gripped the hilt of his katana. "Let's get this thing started."  
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

_Blam! Blam! Blam!_  
The juga snarled and fell to its knees as blinding pain blossomed inside its chest cavity, informing the armored demon of the unfortunate things the mithril-tipped explosive rounds were doing to its all-important organs. The human body gripped in the talons of its left arm spasmed pitifully as blood continued to seep from his crushed body, and as the soldier's killer fell to his knees, it weakly tossed the corpse before him, a wash of blood trailing through the air behind it.

The IEF sergeant grit his teeth as he watched his dead subordinate roll on the ground in front of the stalagmites they were using as cover, a thick smear of bright red marking his path.  
The juga that had ambushed them barked a final, short growl, and a brackish dark liquid sputtered from its bladed mandibles before the beast toppled forward.  
"They have the entrance! There's too many of them!"  
"Sergeant! Captain Haritzki's command squad is cut off! They need reinforcements!"  
The sergeant grimaced as he watched two lizardmen charge into the cavern tunnel, only to be cut down by rifle fire before they realized their ambush had already been stopped.  
Turning on his radio mouthpiece, he switched to the HQ frequency. "Messiah Air Command, this is Sergeant Vahn; I need an ETA on that air strike! We're never going to break through to the cavern exit otherwise!"  
_Psht! This is Messiah Air Command, air strike ETA: three minutes. Please hold position at least thirty meters from the entrance and take cover._  
"Sergeant! What about the captain?" A corporal asked over another volley of gunfire.  
"Captain Haritzki will have to hold out! We can't abandon this tunnel and let them flank the main attack force!"  
_Blam! Blam!_ "Damn bastard has a magic shield!"  
Glancing over the boulder he was leaning on, the sergeant frowned as he watched a single evon slowly advance toward them through the tunnel, holding his hand out as a blue sphere shimmered around him. Bullets began impacting the barrier immediately, causing soft ripples in the surface as the mage projecting it grunted from the strain.  
A moment later, lizardmen started to pour out from around the bend and crowd around the slowly advancing mage, their swords and axes twitching in anticipation of the coming battle.  
"Squad seven! Draw swords!" Another sergeant ordered. Immediately one formation of soldiers dropped to their knees, fastened their rifles to the straps on their right thighs, and then drew the short swords fastened to their left thighs. After another moment they stood up again, taking positions to intercept the oncoming demons.  
'This will be a bloodbath if we let them get into melee...' Vahn thought as he fired a few rounds into the barrier with no further result. "Sustain fire! Bring down that shield! Ready grenades!"  
_Blam! Blam! Blam!_ The evon mage growled as he focused his full power into his shield, forcing it to stay strong against the barrage of exploding shells.  
'Just a little... more...' As he stepped just outside of a lizardman's jumping distance from the soldiers' cover, he felt the reptilian beasts around him bristle in excitement, and he grinned.  
_Blam! Blam! TWANG!_ The mage flinched back as a searing lance of pain flared in his head at the same time a bright red bolt erupted against his shield, and the evon gaped as he realized that the shot had started to break apart the shield's spell pattern.  
He didn't get a chance to do much else as a sniper bullet tore through the small, rapidly expanding hole left by the disruptor bullet, piercing him right in the forehead and effectively ending his headache permanently.  
"The hell? Shield's down! Open fire!"  
"Use your sidearms! Squad seven, defensive formation! Don't engage until the last moment!"  
_Blam! Blam!_ The sergeant shot down one of the oncoming demons as the confused lizardmen began a panicked charge, and then flinched as he watched his next target suddenly drop onto the ground below, blood gushing out of the back of its skull.  
Turning around, he grimaced. "Well, well. Looks like backup arrived." Without wasting further time on words or speculation, he turned back toward the quickly dispersing attack and raised his rifle.

In the shadows of the tunnel behind the lights of the soldiers' defensive position, a lithe figure covered in fur and wearing a tan body armor vest lowered a massive sniper rifle, and the meager light in the cavern glinted off of bright, sharpened canines as he grinned. "Battle's taking a turn for the better. We should be able to hold here easily until the order comes."  
At barely six feet in height, and a slender, lean body, Garron would have been considered, in the werewolf circles where he had originated from, as a scrawny weakling. Taking into consideration the eyepatch that covered his useless right eye, the lycanthrope probably would have been bullied by the other scrawny weaklings, too. Among the IEF, however, physical ability wasn't the foremost measure of status; in that capacity his favorite weapon, a Yamako U-77 heavy sniper rifle served him very well.  
A second individual remained in the shadows, watching the combat with his hand resting in his pockets. His dark skin blended in perfectly among the darkness, aided by the night-black cloak wrapped around him. Attached to his forearms was a pair of small dark blue shields with the IEF elmblem stamped on the face.  
The werewolf turned to the figure, and would have been unable to distinguish him even at that short distance if not for the low-light vision apparatus attached over his left eye. "Emrey, are you just going to stand there, or are you gonna help?"  
The lieutenant remained still. "No reason to get in their way. They're winning, aren't they?"  
Garron snorted and raised his rifle again. _Pchnk!_ The muffled discharge was accompanied by a barely recognizable spark from the rifle muzzle, which in turn was accompanied by another lizardman corpse tumbling to the ground a moment later. "You have a responsibility to fight when called for, you know. If some of our men die when we could have saved them..." the werewolf mumbled in his usual hoarse, raspy English. _Pchnk!_  
"I don't recall being ordered to fight at the front lines. If I'm needed, I'll fight," Emrey snapped back, still watching the battle with eyes that glowed white in the darkness.  
_Pchnk!_ Garron put down another lizardman in mid-charge, and sighed as he watched the demons' assault completely shatter, with the remaining survivors and wounded turning around and attempting to scramble out of the tunnel amongst their dead. "Hmph... and you wonder why Karen won't give you the time of day..."  
The rakshasa bristled for a moment, and stuttered incoherently for a a few seconds before finally spitting out, "That's Colonel Molsk to you, Sergeant..."  
"Yeah, yeah..." _Pchnk!_  
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"This is crazy! Where are the reinforcements?"  
_Blam! Blam! Shrk!_ "Gleagh!"  
The IEF captain flinched as one of the assaulting juga smashed aside one of his main guard, tearing out bits of bones and chunks of flesh with its two-foot claws. That same juga grunted at a small mithril round a moment later from a corporal's sidearm, and the officer scrambled away as the armored beast turned to eviscerate the brave fool.  
"Retreat! Hurry! If we catch up to the main assault force-" another guard started to say before a grend's battleaxe smashed into his chest, caving in his ribcage even though the blade failed to cut through the man's body armor.  
Captain Haritzki stumbled to his feet as the screaming and growling behind him began to wind down, and tried his best to hug the cavern wall as he ran blindly through the dark amongst the nearly-blind covering fire being given by his men who had already gotten away.  
"Command! Company A! Is anybody reading me?" Haritzki shouted into his communicator. "We need help! Most of our squads have been wiped out! We walked right into an ambush! SomeboGWAAH!" He shouted in surprise as a blade attached to a chain shot out from the darkness and speared his thigh, sending the man sprawling onto the ground.  
Several heavily armored grends stomped forward, one of them tugging on the chain stuck in the struggling soldier.  
"Captain!"  
"Open fire! Halt the retreat! Fire, fire!"  
The two demons began to dart forward toward the bloodied remnants, but thought better of it as gunfire suddenly exploded around them, lighting up the tunnel in disorienting flashes and sending the two warriors tumbling backwards before the barrage.  
A young soldier rushed out from where the withdrawing forces were taking cover, and carelessly ripped the blade out of the captain's leg before dragging the man behind the stalagmite clusters they were using as cover.  
"Resume the withdrawal! As soon as those juga regroup, we won't be able to fend off another attack!"  
"How many lanterns do we have left?"  
"Just the one, sir!"  
"Somebody help Yakowski with the captain! Don't drag his injured leg along the ground, lift him up!"

The soldier holding the lantern began to sweat as he heard the menacing growls and sporadic bursts of gunfire behind him, and lifted the squad's only remaining light source higher as the force reached a small pond area littered with bones and old, rotten barrels.  
_Clomp! Clomp!_ The man paled as his light reflected the dull sheen of a natural armor shell, and several of his companions cursed outright as two juga emerged from the adjacent tunnel, silhouetted against the lantern's light.  
"More of the damn things? We're surrounded!"  
One of the men grit his teeth and raised his rifle.  
"Wait!" The captain gasped out, pushing off of the man that had saved him to lean against the wall. "D-Don't shoot! Hold your fire!"  
"What?" A sergeant shouted angrily. "You want to surrender? They'll kill us anyway!"  
The captain took several painful breaths as the sound of heavy footfalls echoed through the cavern tunnels, heralding the armored demons swiftly approaching from both sides. "Better than what the Colonel will do to us if you shoot her pet monsters."  
Several of the men blinked in surprise, and then their eyes widened in understanding. The private holding the lantern heaved a leaden sigh and nervously stepped aside, noting the large mechanical forearm bracers and the white IEF insignias that had been etched into the jugas' armor that he hadn't thought to look for.

_Blam! Blam! Blam!_ The enemy juga grunted as he plodded forward through the darkness, holding its massive arms before itself to shield its torso and head from the oncoming bullets.  
Behind it its more fragile companions slithered behind their walking shield, twitching with excitement as they predicted once again leaping into the chaos of close combat against the soft, slow human troops.  
_Blam!_ A gargled shout came from the armored demon's mouth as a lucky shot tore into a weak point on its leg, and the beast nearly fell flat on its horned face as it stumbled to one knee.  
Ignoring the angry/encouraging hisses and shouts from behind it, the mighty demon grabbed the wall with its right hand, its diamond-like talons sinking deeply into the rock. Then it pulled itself slowly to its feet, willing its damaged body to continue the advance.  
It was roughly around this point that, around the pain and bloody determination, the demon wondered why the humans had stopped shooting. After all, it could still see them huddled around their tiny mechanical lantern, if barely. There seemed to be a large shadow moving closer that was obstructing its view considerably, and it hadn't gotten a good look at the object since it was busy trying to protect its skull from being riddled with holes.  
'Wait... where'd that one come from? And why is it moving away from the humans?' Was the juga's last thought, before a hydraulic-assisted claw reached out and crushed its skull into a wet, bloody paste.

"Hssss! Traitors!" A grend growled as it plowed its bloody axe into one of the incoming jugas, only to be smacked aside almost casually to bounce against the cavern wall.  
The other juga lurched forward as its partner smashed into the vanguard, and raised a claw to the side as it activated one of the switches on its harness.  
_FWOOSH!_ A jet of flaming jelly lit up the cavern as several lizardmen met a painful, fiery end, finally giving the main body of the assault force a good look at what had denied their progress.  
The juga at the core of the formation snarled at seeing two of its own standing silently before the pile of burned and bloody demons. It could see the human's steel magic had enchanted the creatures, as each one had metal objects clamped onto their arms that gleamed slightly brighter than their armor in the firelight. Tubes and grooves wove from those peripherals and wound into their backs, being fed from some power source clamped onto the rogue demons' backs. From one pair of talons squirted bursts of flame, either as a warning or out of excitement for the battle to come. The other pair of talons leaked only blood, a indicating its more visceral uses.  
Despite the obvious agitation of its companions, the band leader swiped a claw behind it, commanding a withdrawal. "Back off and head through the West tunnel! The humans will have more help!"  
The bloody-taloned juga stepped forward, its companion following closely at its side. "It's no use. Throw down your arms or die!"  
"SSSSHYAAAAH!" The juga raider hissed at its IEF counterpart, stepping backward as the company of demons behind it began to fall back.  
"**Blue wing**!"  
The juga was startled out of making spiteful noises at its opposing brethren when a feminine voice shouted out behind it. Turning around, he saw several light blue arcs of energy emerge from the tunnel behind them, spiraling into the ranks of the confused raiders.  
_Crshnk! Crshk!_ Three lizardmen who had just turned each took an ice wave across their torso, and ice sprouted over the point of impact, freezing in place as an inch-thick cross-section of their body froze solid.  
As the juga resumed growling impotently, a lithe, very female figure sauntered into the dying light cast by the burning demons, her hand glowing an iradescent blue.  
Raising a single hand, she smirked at the snarling beasts caught in her spell, and then snapped her fingers.  
_Crash! Smash! Crack!_ Each of the lizardmen shattered in two as the ice around and in them broke apart, and the other demons flinched back as the unlucky beasts fell to the ground, their bloodless corpses etched with expressions of sheer agony.  
"You're not going anywhere, juga. By international code seven-seven-eight-one, the IEF has designated you and your men for eradication. Non-combat personnel may surrender. The rest of you had better try your luck running," Karen finished, both her hands now glowing with a soft blue light.  
"Shrahg nal umk tring!" The lead juga grunted, noting with growing dread that the IEF jugas had actually backed off rather than helping their comrade.  
"I wouldn't advise it," Karen said, smirking as the demons froze. "I already killed off your friends in the topside tunnel. You're alone and out of luck."  
The demonic raider hesitated. "Shuluk yra num gahree?"  
"No, I don't speak Gaerieth, but I understand it just fine," Karen said matter-of-factly.  
"Then understand this, human," the juga snarled in its demonic tongue, "once the light fades, we seal your fate!"  
Karen didn't say anything, but remained standing in the tunnel as the darkness slowly began to creep up behind her; the fuel from the flamer had finally been consumed, and with no other light nearby, the cave-dwelling beasts would have an undisputed advantage over her. Despite all her power, the only light her ice magic could generate could at best be considered decorative.  
She smirked as a gutsy lizardman stepped over to his dying brothers and swiped the flame out with his tail.  
'Three seconds until point-blank...' the super-soldier thought as she placed her hands together, feeling the energy burning with her mana-circuits.  
'Two...' As she parted her hands, she could hear the hateful snarl of the reptilian beasts charging her, and her heartbeat accelerated slightly as a tinge of fear crawled into her mind; a normal reaction for her, and a holdover from the days where she couldn't eradicate a unit of bloodthirsty marauders all on her own.  
'One.' "**Cryon rage**!" Throwing her arms forward, the grend that had its spear barely a foot from Karen's forehead suddenly lost all feeling in his body before he was torn apart into little frozen pieces.  
The demons behind it, being far enough back that they actually got to see their death approach a split second before it claimed them, witnessed several white streams of light emerging from the sorceress's hands, curving around her body and eventually streaking toward them erratically like shining blue missiles. The low blue light cast by the oncoming burst of energy illuminated the grend before her as it seemed to disintegrate into broken ice crystals, and the remaining demons could only gape as a wave of razor-sharp icicles rushed toward them along the wall, beckoned by the magical icy claws that spiraled through the air down the tunnel.  
_SKRAAAK!_

Karen let out a sigh as she shifted her power back to her ice shield, trying to stave off the biting cold that she had created. One of the disadvantages of being a cybernetically enhanced mage was that she had to shift power away from her defensive energies in order to use her more powerful spells, and in that state she was far from immune to the catastrophic changes in temperature she was prone to creating. It was a problem that "normal" mages dealt with easily, but she could only handle with grit and great skill.  
'I'm lucky I use ice; the fire MEs can't even use their most powerful spells without killing themselves.' As a natural rule, cold took time to kill and tended to recede after a spell was cast. Heat could cause damage much more quickly, and fire had a tendency to spread.  
A growling brought her attention back to the tunnel, and Karen stepped forward into the darkness. The remnants of the captain's company had moved on by now, and the jugas should have followed; neither of them wanted to be anywhere near the enemy once Karen let loose her magic.  
"Hm. So you survived," she stopped in her tracks, and then silently activated her levitation program. Within seconds she floated a foot from the ground, clearing enough space all around her so that she could move quickly without tripping over one of her own icicles. "How badly are you wounded? Would you like me to finish you off quickly."  
She smirked at the retaliatory growl. It probably meant something in Gaerieth, but her understanding of the language didn't include many profanities. 'Juga are resistant to extreme temperatures; in the case of heat, their armor actually seemed to allow absolute conduction of energy through their bodies without a problem, but in the case of cold...' She licked her lips as she went through her mental list of spells. Sucking enough heat from the armor to cause it to contract and break was always difficult, but it was easier than trying to hack apart the armor with ice blades.  
'Actually, I think some light would be appropriate, first.' With that thought, she reached for her belt, and tore off a red stick before twisting off the plastic cap.  
_Fsssssssh!_ The jagged walls of ice gleamed magnificently in the light of the flare, and it took Karen a moment to adjust her eyes from the light show cast by her own spell effects.  
She almost snickered once she saw the remaining opponent, encased in ice up to its chest. Huge spikes of ice jutted out from its prison and melded with the walls, holding the beast solidly as it struggled weakly against the frost that had sealed it.  
"Well, that' just not fair. You're gonna make me feel bad about killing you!" She said amiably as she floated forward toward the trapped demon, though the vicious smirk on her face assured the creature that any of the aforementioned feelings would be quite minor and likely very temporary.  
"**Zero point**!"  
_SHKRAK!_  
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"This is Hydra Six, completing our third run on the camp now."  
_Confirmed, Hydra Wing. Begin final bombing run and return to the Messiah. Target?_  
"We scattered the main defensive force holding out at the tunnel exit and flattened the barracks and main armories. All we can do now is drop the eggs where they'll crack the loudest."  
_Roger, Hydra Wing. The second battalion has yet to reach their forward position. You are cleared to begin your run._

As her radio link was cut, the leader of the Hydra attack flight turned and flew in a tight arc, circling around the mountain that hid the cavern complex for a third and final pass on the scattered forces below. Two other mini-bombers followed in a close formation, their bellies opening up to reveal the last of their munitions for their mission.  
The pilot designated Hydra Six glanced at the digital display in front of her that approximated where her final bomb would land, and her hand tightened slightly around the flight stick as she passed by the perimeter palisade that was intended to keep invaders at bay.  
'Wait... what happened there?' The pilot frowned as she noticed a huge hole in one section of the wall, as if something had burst through.  
"Hydra One, Five, did either of you hit the palisade? I know I didn't put that hole in there."  
_Negative, Lead. This area's nowhere near our strike zone._  
_I didn't do it... man, what the hell's going on down there? I see bogeys running around everywhere!_  
A burst of flame blossomed from below, and the flight leader leaned to one side to try and get a better look at the distant shapes that were sent flying from the blast. "What's going on? There's a battle down there! I thought our boys weren't-"  
_SKRK!_ She jerked back in her seat as a long, gleaming chain whipped upward seemingly from nowhere and lashed straight through the Vulture VTOL jet to her left, causing a burst of sparks and bits of metal to spray out the back. In the same instant the cockpit canopy turned from being perfectly clear to being covered in blood, completely hiding the shredded corpse within the jet from view.  
For a moment she simply stared in shock at the cockpit of the other craft, her arm trembling. Very slowly, the jet began to split into the two separated halves, as if just realizing that it had been ripped in two, and those halves spilled flame, fuel, and blood as they began to lose altitude.  
_Hydra Six! Are you okay? Was that really a CHAIN?_  
The lead pilot shook herself from her shock, and once again took full control of her aircraft, pulling the mini-bomber away from the camp. "Hydra Wing, abort the attack run and return to base. We did our part, let Colonel Molsk deal with... whatever the hell just did that."  
_Affirmative, Lead. Breaking off._  
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_Shknk!_ Drawing itself down from the wreck of the pod bomber, the long, bladed chain slipped around the arm of the juga that had aimed it like a living creature, wrapping around the demon's bicep in long, loose coils.  
The scarred juga grunted as it saw the other two planes retreat; humans were well known for dishing it out better than they could take it.  
Two centaur gunners stood restlessly at his side as the remainder of the raiders' forces ran about in a disorganized panic, utterly broken; the attack from the caves had caught them by surprise. The bombing runs had ruined their ability to organize a counter-attack.  
But then a second attack had crippled their defense. No one knew where the second attack had come from, how fast it was progressing, or the number and strength of the enemy simply because those who had encountered the enemy didn't last long enough to tell anyone else about what they had seen.  
"Shouldn't we be attacking the caves? They'll break through soon!" One centaur mumbled in Gaerieth as it watched the fleeing raiders in the camp. Its expression twisted into one of disgust; many of the bandits were carrying supplies that had been salvaged from the wreckage of the camp treasury and armory. There was no hope of stopping them to fight off the attackers now.  
The other centaur twitched at an explosion, and turned to watch the main gathering hut half a kilometer away fall apart as black lightning tore through the walls and roof. Several bandits scrambled from the wreckage as clouds of dust jumped up from the ground, and those same creatures dropped dead one at a time as something shot them down from within the ruined structure. "What should we do? There's no hope of opposing the IEF like this!" He brought his rifle up and scanned the hut wreckage with his scope, frowning as the clouds of dust obscured any potential targets completely.  
The juga camp master remained silent for a long moment, the magical chains wrapped loosely around his arms twitching anxiously as they sensed the surrounding violence. "We retreat. Our men will need an operational base to return to, or they'll just be hunted down like wild animals. The camp is lost."  
Another explosion from the wreckage caused the juga's guards to flinch nervously, which in turn distracted them from seeing the incoming spell talismans until it was too late.  
_Pap!_ One of the centaurs blinked in surprise as he felt two paper slips flatten against his flank with surprising force.  
_Vwom!_ All three of the assembled demons jerked back as Kaze teleported in front of them, and the juga stepped back behind his bodyguards as they swung their rifles into position.  
"Ah-ah-ah!" Kaze leaned his staff to one side, and the pointed at the talismans pinned to one of the gunners.  
_KABLAM!_ The unfortunate centaur suddenly burst into flames at the gesture as the fireburst spell took effect, and its nearly-as-unfortunate partner screamed in pain as a wash of flame engulfed it, easily catching on its thick fur and well-oiled leather armor.  
The juga snarled as its bodyguard fell to the ground in flames, and then raised its arms, the dangling chains shaking ominously at the gesture.  
Kaze threw two more talismans into the air, and then beckoned the demon with his free hand as the slips of paper floated above.

The bandit leader clenched its talons, and both chains shot off of its arms, the blades at the end twisting wildly as they drove forward, like a drill.  
With but a short mental command, the two talismans swept apart through the air, stopping in front of the oncoming weapons.  
_CRACK!_ To the juga's shock, his chains impacted the slips of paper and stopped dead, unable to pierce the energy barriers generated around the fragile talismans.  
Concentrating deeply, Kaze started to chant as the enemy's weapons writhed and struggled against the tiny barriers, and his staff floated out of his grasp and hovered between his hands.  
"Kings of the sky, release your wrath! **Raging thunder**!"  
At his cry, bolts of lighting leapt from his outstretched hands, striking the talismans and then running along the chains to feed into the juga holding the chains.  
Kaze smirked as thick ribbons of electricity curled around the demon's armor, and that smirk slowly died as the juga continued to stare contemptuously at him, completely unhurt.  
"You're new at this, aren't you?" The juga growled out, retracting his chains as the lightning passed through its super-conductive armor and was radiated harmlessly.  
Kaze blinked, then scratched his head as he tried to think up a new strategy on the spot. "What did you say? I'm sorry, do you speak Japanese? Or English, maybe?"  
'Yes, definitely new at this,' the demon thought ruefully, quite annoyed that his camp was being overrun by such inexperienced, if not powerful, characters.  
_KABOOM!_ The ground shook slightly as a huge energy beam impacted several meters away, and the demon spared a glance over his shoulder as he watched a large man in a trench coat run down a grend and slice it in two. As the man ran past the combat, the scarred juga dismissed him; that one would be a much more difficult foe than the cleric before it, and besides which, a retreat had already been planned.  
Kaze backed away, and then pulled several more spell talismans out of his robes, wondering what had happened that his last spell had been so ineffective. 'An unnaturally high spell resistance, perhaps? Well, then I'm in quite a pinch, aren't I?' Throwing the talismans out into the air, he immediately forced the slips of paper onto the ground, and then jabbed his staff at them.  
"Spirits of the earth, give form to clay and will to stone! Clay dolls, arise!" A slight rumbling marked the completion of the spell as four medium-sized dirt golems slowly rose up from the ground to meet the enemy.  
Said enemy snorted in irritation. Here this fool was, having cut through the defenses of its entire army of raiders, and he thought to combat the master of that army with novice parlor tricks?  
The juga shot both his chains forward, impaling one of the golems through the chest. Then the chains suddenly twisted about rapidly, causing the magical construct to spasm wildly as it was swiftly broken apart.  
Moving the whirling lengths of steel to the side, the camp master ripped straight through the next golem, and then wrapped one chain around the next, entangling the construct's legs.  
_Vwom!_ Hearing the telltale sign of Kaze's blink spell, the demon quickly whipped its free chain around behind it, shredding the two talismans that had already been sailing toward its back.  
Kaze clicked his tongue and reinforced his personal shield as the demon's chain lashed out at it, causing thick tears and distortions to appear as the jagged length of metal tore fiercely against the barrier.  
Had the evon cleric been more experienced, perhaps he would have been able to recognize the unique distortion of the juga's mandibles that indicated it was actually grinning at him. As it was, he could only blink in surprise and curiosity as the juga yanked the entangled golem into the air, bringing it high above them.  
Snarling, the armored demon swung the chain down, and Kaze's eyes widened as he found himself squarely in the strike zone of a six-hundred pound flail.  
_SMASH!_ Rock and dirt burst upward as the golem touched down, and the juga grinned again as it drew in both of its chains.  
Its moment of victory was interrupted by a solid strike to the back of the head, which ultimately did little other than annoy the armored monstrosity and remind it of the final golem's presence.  
Whirling around, the juga grabbed the golem in one claw and lifted it up, preparing to toss the useless construction away.  
It was about then that it noticed another spell talisman besides the creation spell attached to the golem's forehead. This one was attached to the construct's belly, and to the juga's growing dread, had just started to glow...  
_FLASH!_ A bright white light utterly stunned the scarred beast, and the camp master grunted ineffectually as it found itself unable to move.  
_Vwom!_ "Nice try, but Toren wins this round!" Kaze cheered from behind the demon as he brought his staff up, charging it with energy. "Hand of judgment, descend and smite the unworthy! **Kai blade**!" A gleaming white light engulfed the Eye of Malakai, and the micreant priest thrust his weapon into his enemy's back.  
_CRACK!_ The juga spasmed painfully as a glowing lance of energy suddenly burst from the head of the staff upon contact with its carapace and impaled it through the chest, tearing a hole easily through its hardened armor and spearing some its favorite organs.  
Kaze, for his part, was fairly shocked that his maneuver had worked, and quickly pulled his staff away as the light vanished into a shower of bright sparkles.  
The juga let out a garbled hiss, and then fell to its knees before teetering forward.  
_Thud!_

"I... I did it... I actually did it..." Kaze mumbled to himself as he watched a pool of blood start to spread underneath the fallen creature. "I won! I fought a powerful enemy and won! YAHOOO!"  
A few of the demons that had not yet left the camp or been killed by Kaze's two rampaging companions stopped and watched as an evon cleric began shouting and dancing atop a short hill, waving his staff in the air. A couple that possessed ranged weapons considered killing the fool for wandering around a warzone and leaving his back open, but a quick glance at the body he was dancing over quickly changed their mind; they had already opted for the coward's way out. No sense in drawing attention to themselves now, was there?  
After skipping a full circle around the fallen juga, Kaze turned and kicked it, causing a bit of blood to squirt out of its back. "Ha! That'll teach you to defy justice! Take that! And this!" _Thud! Whump! BOOOM!_  
A nearby explosion reminded the evon that he was still in the midst of a battle zone, and he stopped kicking the bleeding demon as he came to his senses.  
"Okay then... I defeated a primary opponent... his corpse lies before me..." The clerics expression brightened as he realized what came next. "Of course! Looting!"  
He eagerly scanned the corpse, and his eyes immediately settled on the pouch attached to the demon's pelvic armor. "That and the chains... juga don't generate heartstones upon expiring, and I doubt I could carry the carapace to a merchant..." With that settled, he grabbed for the pouch.  
Kaze was understandably upset, disturbed, and angry when the juga's arm moved to prevent his well-deserved acquisition, seizing his arm and holding it firmly within its huge, bladed talons. Fear probably should have been a factor as well, but the cleric was still reeling from his decisive victory, and wasn't about to let some walking suit of armor on the brink of death keep him from his just desserts.  
"Hey! No! Let go and die! Bad!" He shouted as he started kicking the demon again and beating its hand with his staff.  
The juga grunted and spat out some blood as it tried to gather its strength, noting with great annoyance that the evon's staff let out painful bursts of energy every time it impacted its claw.  
"DIE, WRETCHED INSECT!" It snarled in Gaerieth as it rose to its knees, swinging its free arm around to impale the priest of Malakai.  
_Crack!_ Its arm stopped as a tarnished, rusty blade suddenly pierced its elbow joint, and the juga let another gargled cry as the last of its energy vanished. A moment later the blinding pain began to fade as well as consciousness slipped away from it.

_Thud!_ Ranma sighed and planted a foot on the juga's arm, bracing himself so that he could tear his sword free. "You have to be more careful, Koz. Juga are resilient bastards."  
"I noticed," the cleric growled as he pried his arm out the corpse's talons. Then he snatched up the pouch on the creature's waist. "I still want credit for that kill, though."  
"If I get credit for saving your life," Ranma responded as he sheathed his blade. Then he began working the chains free of the juga's arms.  
"Done. Where's Shikodan?"  
Ranma frowned. "Wait a sec..."  
Kaze had thought that his leader was asking him to wait until he was finished taking the chains. He was wrong.  
_KABLAM!_ Ranma pointed in the general direction of the explosion as he tugged the first coil of chains free. "He's over that way. Help me with these chains and we can go get 'im. It's probably not a good idea to have a demon knight running around with the IEF attacking..."  
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Teema, Yun, hold here," Karen commanded as she saw the end of the tunnel ahead amidst a great deal of rubble and burnt demon corpses.  
The two jugas halted in their tracks, antennae twitching in the air.  
"Shtek kla klattak!" The larger demon, Yun said.  
Karen nodded and held her hand up to her communicator headset. "Yun says there isn't much alive out there; has the enemy fled the base? I would've thought that they'd hold their central position more strongly."  
_Colonel Molsk, this is Messiah Command. We have signs from our survey drones of a retreat, but it's much smaller and less organized than it should be. We also have a few reports of a battle taking place inside the camp._  
Karen blinked. "At the same time we infiltrated the caverns? I thought the general scrapped the idea of a pincer strike."  
_She did. It seems something else is taking advantage of our attack. You are to do a reconnaissance sweep of the main camp and attempt to identify the third party. Company A and C will secure the supply tunnels and then await your signal to attack._  
"Roger that. On my way," the sorceress answered as she stepped forward into the streaming sunlight, charging her personal barrier to full power.

"Hmph. How rude. After all the trouble we went through to get here, nobody stuck around to greet us," Karen mused as she looked around at the bomb craters littering the ground before her. Burnt and blasted demon remains could also be found strewn about the charred ground, indicating that the raiders had not understood the full extent of the assault until it was too late.  
The entrances to the tunnels were protected by small secondary palisades and, before the retreat, a contingent of defenders. Both defensive measures now lay around the entrance in a pile of rubble that blocked Karen's view of the bandit camp, which itself was littered with fallen trees and more craters. The raiders had built their camp in a forest and neglected to remove the trees from within the perimeter to provide better defense and to better hide the fortifications from intruders, which in turn had allowed for an easier infiltration once the camp had been located.  
Activating her levitation key, the IEF Colonel pushed off of the ground and floated above the piles of debris, hoping to get a better view of the surrounding area.  
_Shoof! Wsh!_ A rustling noise from the forest adjacent immediately attracted her attention, and one of her hands began to glow as she fed energy into one of her quicker spell programs while keeping her shield reinforced.  
Within seconds, two adult werewolves armed with axes burst from the treeline, leaping over the nearest rubble and landing firmly within one of the blast craters.  
Karen smirked. "Heh! I didn't think your kind would flee... so... easily..." she trailed off as both lycanthropes dashed under her and ran toward the cave entrance without even stopping to glance at the woman floating above them menacingly.  
Karen didn't turn around, though her left eye twitched as the sounds of brutal violence met the demons' retreat; apparently Teema and Yun had successfully held their position.  
"Oh-kay... so there's something out there scarier than a full IEF battalion..." the colonel mumbled. It wasn't really a fair judgment, as the bandits had no way of knowing how many soldiers lay in wait within the supply tunnels, but they definitely should have known better than to make for the caverns.  
_Boom! Crash!_ A much louder noise from within the same cluster of trees interrupted her musing, and she grimaced as she noticed several of the trees shaking as large, dark shapes approached through the underbrush.  
'You're not getting away this time!' she swore as she chose a spell and charged it (although most people would not have considered the werewolves' escape successful).  
_KABLAM!_ A massive fireball burst at the edge of the forest cluster, blowing several trees over and throwing rocks and dirt into the air.  
Karen remained calm as her shield lit up around her, absorbing the oncoming wave of heat as the soft blue bubble entered the visible spectrum. "**Frost wall**!" Waving a glowing white hand beneath her, ice began to slowly form in a long line behind the floating sorceress, eventually building to a certain width before shooting upward at a much greater speed.  
The three assembled demons glowered as their escape route was sealed off right in front of them, and turned their attentions toward the magic-user standing in the air.  
The colonel's eyes narrowed. 'Two jugas and a devil. These are heavy hitters, but still no sign of an organized defense. They look like they're running too.' She frowned as she noticed that one of the jugas was badly injured, with blood flowing slowly from the charred stump where its arm used to be, as well as from a large crack in its front torso armor.  
"Damn humans," the devil snarled in gritty English, "get out of our way, or you'll be killed too!"  
"Humans? As in more than one?" Karen replied back in the same language, both her hands lighting up with magical energies. "Check your math, freak. I don't need any help to deal with the likes of you."  
The demons tensed, and the devil withdrew a spear that had been clamped to its back, preparing to fight.  
_Crack! Snap!_  
The beasts all flinched as more noise came from the ravaged forest behind them, and Karen raised an eyebrow.  
"It's no good! We have to flee!" One of the jugas chirped in Gaerieth as his wounded companion nodded frantically.  
"Rotten humans!" The devil shouted at Karen, ignoring his companions as his spear was suddenly surrounded by flame. "I'll kill all of you!"  
_SHOOM!_  
Karen flinched back as a thick black beam of energy burst from the forest and slammed into the relatively healthy juga, sweeping it off its feet and blasting it straight into the wall of ice she had created.  
_KRAKOOM!_

The wounded juga blinked its large, black eyes, then pointed its remaining hand toward the large, smoking hole that had been created in the magical ice. "Look! A way out!"  
The devil sweatdropped as bits of wood and ice showered over him, well aware that their retreat had been all but stopped. Summoning his flames all around him, the demon turned to meet their pursuer, idly hoping that the floating woman would mind her own business for a little while and stay out of it.  
Within seconds Rayden leapt from the treeline, delivering a downward chop that the devil swiftly dodged.

"Whoa!" Karen flinched as the ground erupted under the newcomer's blade, flinging a great cloud of dust and debris upward as the great sword struck the Earth. "Okay... so that's what they're so scared of..." she began to rub her chin thoughtfully as the man wearing the trench coat dispatched the wounded demon by grabbing the juga's head and driving it into the ground, once again kicking up a small burst of dirt and rock.

Rayden kicked away the incapacitated juga, and then turned around to concentrate once more on the devil.  
_Crack!_ He was rewarded for his trouble by a spear point striking him in the abdomen and sinking deep into his stomach, and as he clenched his teeth against the pain, he saw the devil on the other of the spear grin maliciously.  
_FWOOSH!_ Flames exploded around the spear and quickly engulfed the man stuck on the end of it, consuming Rayden entirely in a sudden firestorm that swallowed the demon knight and licked the edges of the forest. Still the devil didn't let go or try to retract his weapon, and continued to concentrate as more and more fire blasted from his weapon's head and shaft.  
Karen clicked her tongue as she prepared to help the swordsman; she wasn't completely sure if the muscular, human-looking man was a friend yet - the man rather looked a bit like a raider himself, really - but until he swung at a human she was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.  
Before she charge a spell, however, a blazing hand suddenly reached out from the firestorm and struck the shaft of the spear, breaking it and two. The devil, shocked into a moment of vulnerability, didn't react in time before a second arm reached out of the flames and grabbed it by the front of its armor chestplate.  
Karen blinked in shock as she watched the blazing figure drag its attacker forward into the fire he had created... and then hug him. Which, she had to admit, must have really hurt since the figure was on fire, but still didn't make much sense until a few seconds later.  
_Bzrt!_ An arc of electricity curled around the struggling pair, and the IEF spectator watched curiously as a spark of dark blue energy seemed to rise upward from the conflict before dissipating.  
_KRACKABOOM!_ A thick, black bolt of lightning jabbed downward through the point marked by the spark, and a huge wave of force blew away the flames instantly as both fighters were consumed in a sudden maelstrom of electrical plasma.  
Great spurts of blood erupted from the devil's arms and torso as he screamed, and the demon barely managed to tear himself free of his opponent as ribbons of dark magic ripped and seared his flesh.  
Rayden cracked open his burned eyelids (he had learned long ago to close his eyes when he was being set on fire. Smart!) and then wrenched his sword from the ground where he had lodged it. Then he swung it sidelong into the writhing devil's torso, causing a new wave of blood to burst from the demon as the great blade sunk through the brittle armor of the devil's chestplate.  
Rather than withdrawing the sword for another strike, the Dread Knight drove the sword forward and then upward, lifting the devil up into the air along the edge of his blade. Then he swung Darkrune into the ground, hard. _CRUNCH!_

Karen winced as she watched the devil explode in a bloody shower as it was smashed between the hard-packed Earth and the swordsman's weapon, its toughened constitution no match at all for the brutal attack.  
'Well, great. Now does he want to do the same thing to me, or not?' Karen thought as she stared down at the severely burned warrior with her arms crossed over her chest.  
With his last victim slain, Rayden stabbed his great sword down into the corpse before turning to the next target: the only conscious thing in sight.  
He was already drawing one of his bolt pistols when he realized that this target looked like a human woman, wasn't attacking him, and had a military-ish uniform on (Rayden, despite being familiar with styles of dress common to sorceresses and various warrior women, still thought they looked damned ridiculous, and the camouflage leotard was no exception).  
Stopping for a moment, the demon knight tried to remember why this woman, who was likely not a bandit, would be here. Miraculously, he succeeded.  
"Hey, are you one of those IEF people?" He asked bluntly, lowering his pistol.  
Karen breathed a sigh of relief at seeing the man back down, and gently landed on the ground. While she expected her magic would have been up to the task of stopping him, the man had suffered a large stab wound in the stomach, and had been engulfed in flames; to that end, he seemed to have no trouble moving around, and he had only suffered several first-degree burns on his face, neck, and chest as result. She had no desire to test the full extent of such resilience.  
"Yes, I'm Karen Molsk of the Israeli Expeditionary Force, Second Battalion. I'm here as part of a large-scale infiltration and assault on this raider camp," she explained diplomatically, "and... is that sword drinking that demon's blood?" She stepped back as she stared at the blade in trepidation.  
"Yeah, it does that sometimes," Rayden said conversationally, turning to watch as the last scattered droplets of bright red streamed slowly through the dirt to climb up the dark blade's edge. "Well, nice ta meetcha. I've gotta go find other things to kill now." Wrenching Darkrune from the ground, Rayden quickly slipped it into the sheath on his back before turning away.  
"Wait! Who are you?" Karen said irritably. "I introduced myself, now it's your turn."  
The Dread Knight sighed, and turned his head slightly, hoping the annoying woman would leave him alone after this. "I'm Rayden Shikodan. Dark paladin. Third Brotherhood. You know, the destruction one? Yes, I'm a demon. Can I go now?"  
Karen once again crossed her arms over her chest as her expression hardened. "No, you may not. What are you doing here? It's dangerous!"  
"No, really? I'm glad you warned me!" Rayden snapped sarcastically, and Karen had the decency to blush. "I'm killing bad guys, same as you. What's the problem?"  
The IEF colonel glowered at him. "The problem is that... if... you..." she trailed off as her eyes locked onto something behind the man she was talking to, and Rayden noticed that the sorceress had actually started trembling, her mouth hanging open.  
Naturally, he turned around, assuming that her sudden concern was for another group of raiders that had regrouped and were counter-attacking.  
Much to his disappointment, all he saw was Ranma, Kaze, and K all rushing toward him. Kaze was shouting about how he had killed some juga and was waving a pouch around in the air, while Ranma and K were arguing, as usual.

"I can't believe you left me behind again!" K shouted, flying level with Ranma's head as they rushed down the pathway between the groves of trees.  
"If you keep getting on my nerves I just might bring you along next time, just for the chance that some random demon might chop you in half!" Ranma growled at the metadragon.  
"You're mean!"  
"Yeah, well you're stupid!"  
"Shikodan! Shikodan!" Kaze cheered, tapping his staff on the ground and teleporting right in front of the demon knight a moment later. "Look! I killed the bandit leader! I did it! I killed him all by myself!"  
Ranma rolled his eyes, but didn't contest the claim as he went back to arguing with K.  
"That's... uh... great," Rayden mumbled; giving encouragement and congratulations was not really his function. "Which one?"  
Kaze blinked. "What do you mean which one?"  
"In a camp this big, there's more than one boss," Rayden explained. Then he pointed at the devil's corpse. "See? This is a leader too."  
The evon remained silent for a moment, and then his brain switched gears. "My, who is this RAVISHING beauty you've stumbled upon?"  
Rayden shrugged. "Eh, she's Karie something-or-other. I dunno. She stopped talking once you guys arrived, so I've almost forgotten about her."  
At some point in his demon friend's sentence, Ranma had actually finished fighting with his pet dragon, and stopped to take a good look at the woman that had distracted Kaze.  
He blinked in surprise. "What? K-Karen?"  
"Ranma?" The IEF colonel mumbled sleepily, as if in a dream, "is that really you?"  
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K licked his lips as Ranma carried him into the hover transport, staring longingly at the metal handrails and bulkheads as him and his friends were ushered up onto the ramp leading to the roof of the vehicle.  
Despite his protests that he was fine, Kaze ushered Rayden immediately onto one of the benches and sat him down before pressing his hands against the demons face and stomach.  
"I know I've mentioned this before, but your constitution is astonishing," the evon mumbled as his hands began to glow brightly. "To survive a fire blast of this degree... you know, you never mentioned precisely what kind of demon you were."  
"And I don't intend to anytime soon," the Dread Knight replied icily as his wounds began to mend at an accelerated rate, shrinking back and leaving only soft, pink skin. "'Sides, only reason I did so well in the fire is 'cause Ranma gave me that weird fireproof oil I put on my coat." Though it was badly charred and broken in places, the article of clothing merely looked like a scorched cape now instead of the blackened sheet that his old coat had been reduced to under the dragon's flames.  
The pigtailed man nodded absently. "I thought it would be a good idea; you seem to catch fire a lot." He had learned of the oil during his own training mastering his fire aura, and it was no exaggeration to say the substance had saved his life on several occasions. He didn't need it anymore, as his fire aura itself made him extremely heat-resistant, but he had thought to pick up the proper ingredients in Taer'Kul for precisely this kind of situation.

Ranma took a moment to take a good look at the open-topped area that served as the transport's secondary personnel carrier deck when the craft was overloaded or when there was no danger of attack en route, and then looked over the side of the hovercraft as he saw several other identical transports being loaded.  
"So this is the IEF, huh?" K mused.  
"Not all of it," Ranma answered. "This is just the infiltration teams they used to attack the bandits. The IEF has a regular armored assault army, with mechs and tanks and apparently even aircraft." He frowned as he rubbed his chin. "Though really, I can't imagine where the planes came from... the IEF's supposed to be a mobile force; I can't imagine they have airfields all the way out here, or carriers in the East Pacific."  
"Well, you're certainly with the 'in' crowd now, aint'cha," K said slyly. "And you just **happen** to know some high-ranking hottie in the Jew crew, right? C'mon, spill! She an old girlfriend?"  
Unbeknownst to Ranma, and to Rayden's slight annoyance, Kaze stopped his healing and leaned toward the pigtailed wanderer.  
Ranma, for his part, merely opened and closed his mouth repeatedly like a fish, attempting to answer the question with a strong, solid lie, but failing utterly.  
"Oh my Ancient creator," K mumbled, "you slept with her, didn't you?"  
Ranma grabbed the metadragon's beak as he blushed fiercely, looking back at the ramp leading up to where him and his companions rested. "Quiet, you! Keep your damn gossip to yourself!"  
"Tch!" Kaze shook his head and went back to healing. "Such a shame. Seems she's taken."  
A vein popped up on Ranma's head as he looked back at the mischievous cleric. "First of all, we're not really an item or anything; so as far as I know, she's single. And second of all, she's way outta your league anyway."  
Kaze twitched, then turned his attention fully toward fixing up Rayden as he mumbled to himself. "It never changes... I'm literally the will of an ancient god manifest, and the damn jocks STILL get all the girls..."

At that moment the floor beneath them began to tremble, and Ranma watched the treeline suddenly dip below his view over the edge of the transport as the hovercraft left the ground.  
Moments later, the current subject of the wanderers' conversation stepped up the ramp onto the roof of the moving transport, her dark gold ponytail whipping in the wind.  
Remaining silent for a long moment, she looked over at Ranma, hands clasped behind her back nervously, unsure of how to begin.  
"Uh... well, we should probably introduce ourselves formally," Ranma said awkwardly in English, noting from the increasingly loud banging noise that more people were coming up to meet them.  
"Yeah! That's a good idea!" Karen said quickly in the same language as two jugas stomped up from the ramp, followed closely by a curious werewolf and a very suspicious-looking man in a Lieutenant's standard uniform.  
Ranma coughed into his fist, then gestured to Rayden, who was already withdrawing a bottle of brandy that had, like all his other liquor, miraculously survived the brutal ruckus his body had suffered. "This is Rayden Shikodan, a dark paladin. He's our go-to powerhouse and the group drunk. He has a dark and bloody past that's probably very dramatic and possibly even relevant, but nobody's really interested in hearing about it."  
Rayden nodded to the group cordially, then took a deep swig of the brandy.  
Ranma next gestured to Kaze. "This is our new guy, Kaze Toren. He's an avatar of the Order of Malakai, but frankly, he's not very good at it. Just think of him as a cleric or general spellcaster. He's also a bit of a party animal, though I have yet to see him keep alcohol in his robes. I suspect this is because he's working up the courage to ask Rayden how to do it."  
Kaze stood and bowed low to the woman and her attendant demons. "I hope someday to earn the strength and prestige to deny some aspect of that brutally accurate description of my character."  
Ranma jabbed a thumb at the dragon on his shoulder. "This is K. He's a dragon. Like Kaze, he's not very good at being what he is. He mostly talks a lot and eats things that are too useful to be eaten. I want to let you know now that if he starts chewing on this transport or making perverted comments, you can kick him and nobody will care."  
The metadragon gave his caretaker a scathing death glare at this description, and made a mental note to eat the pigtailed man's ammunition later.  
Finally, Ranma jabbed a thumb at himself. "And I'm Ranma Saotome, an all-purpose mercenary. I mostly do demon-hunting, though. And I don't lose my battles. EVER."

Frankly, the assembled demons and sorceress were shocked still at the long and extremely critical introductions, and all of them sported sweatdrops as they tried to gather their wits enough to speak.  
"Uhm... wow. Okay..." Karen shook her head for a moment to clear it. "Well... let's start with Privates Teema and Yun," she gestured to the cybernetic jugas, which each bowed slightly as their names were called. "They're a pair of juga mercenaries that were working with the IEF. Over the course of their contract, most of the group they were with were killed in action, and when the remnants decided to call it quits and seek other employment, they decided to attempt to enlist instead. The cybernetic augments came soon after."  
She turned toward the werewolf, who was leaning on his rifle and staring curiously at the newcomers, his tail swishing back and forth. "This is Sergeant Garron, the best sharpshooter and tracker in the IEF. He enlisted on his own to try and learn how to use firearms, apparently."  
The werewolf nodded cordially in much the same manner Rayden had, still leaning on his rifle.  
Karen then gestured to the man in the army uniform. "This is Lieutenant Emrey, our foremost infiltration expert and field assassin. Despite his looks, he's not actually a human-"  
"We noticed," Rayden, Kaze, and Ranma all deadpanned at once, causing the rakshasa to flinch backward, startled.  
K blinked. "Uh, I noticed too! Totally knew it!" 'How the hell can they tell so quickly? I mean, it must be easy for Kaze since he's a psychic, but... damn!'  
Karen too looked surprised, but recovered quickly. "Right... and I'm Colonel Karen Molsk, field commander of the Second Battalion of the IEF. I'm also a Magi Excelsius prototype super-soldier, series 21. An older model, but one of the more successful ones, if I do say so myself." She finished her introduction on a particularly proud note, raising her chin up.

Rayden was the first to speak. "That's fabulous." Then he turned toward Kaze. "Would someone remind me why we're going with these people? I thought we had something important to do."  
Kaze frowned at him. "Hush. We're not in a big hurry, so just shut up and do what the lady with the cleavage says!" He hissed in a low voice, perhaps under some ridiculous illusion that said lady wasn't close enough to hear him anyway.  
Ranma rolled his eyes. "If we hook up with the IEF, we can hitch a ride closer to Greken's territory much faster than if we keep going by foot. It also decreases our chances of being eaten by dragons. A LOT."  
"Yeah, I'll bet you plan on doing a lot of 'hooking up', huh?" K whispered, actually being quiet enough that only Ranma and Garron, with his sensitive hearing, could pick it up.  
_Thwack!_ In that respect, Garron was the only IEF soldier who wasn't surprised and confused when Ranma swatted the metadragon off of his shoulder and onto the floor.  
"Wait, wait, wait!" Karen said suddenly, raising her hands up to forestall any more pointless bickering and lecherous banter. "So... **none** of you are going to ask why an IEF officer has a squad of demons for her retinue?"  
Ranma shrugged. "Well, you didn't ask why I have a paladin from an evil cult and a priest from a good cult working with me - neither of which are human, now that you mention it - so who am I to question it? Besides, they seem like good guys. Better than mine, anyway."  
Rayden gulped down the last of the bottle of brandy, then burped loudly. "Urk! Yeah, but we're stronger." As if to illustrate Ranma's point, he threw his empty bottle over the railing of the transport, not even watching as it crashed against a random tree and shattered.  
"I... see." Karen massaged her head for a moment, finding Ranma's companions a bit overwhelming despite her glee at finally finding Ranma himself. "Anyway... I'm really glad I ran into you again, Ranma. Gosh! There's so much we have to catch up on!"  
K raised his head up from where he had been smacked onto the floor. "Yeah, like-" _Stomp!_  
Ranma kicked his draconic companion behind him, and smiled softly at the woman across from him. "Yeah... I'd like that."

Kaze snickered and leaned over to Rayden. "Check out the rakshasa!" He whispered, "He's bleeding jealousy like you wouldn't believe!"  
Rayden chuckled, as always finding the misery of others highly entertaining. "You don't need to be a psychic to tell that. Dweeb looks like he's about to pop."  
Overhearing their conversation, Garron stepped over from his fellow soldiers, casting a glance at his shapeshifting superior as the demon fumed. "So, tell me," he said quietly when he gained the two cultists' attention, "what kind of relationship does your leader have with mine?"  
Kaze smirked and tapped his head. "Judging by the sheer range of emotions coming from those two, I'd say they were lovers. Very good lovers, at that."  
The werewolf smirked. "Emrey has been lusting after Colonel Molsk for almost two years now, but despite making friends with non-humans, she refuses to date outside her species." His good eye twinkled slightly. "You may want to tell your friend to be careful; the Lieutenant has a vicious jealous streak."  
"Cool!" Rayden said brightly. "Maybe they'll fight!"  
Garron's good-natured expression vanished. "Huh? You WANT Emrey to attack your friend?"  
"Really, that depends on how much we end up liking Emrey," Kaze explained. "It would be a shame if we warmed up to him, only to see him meet a foolish, bloody end."  
"Although it would still be fun to watch," Rayden said, grinning.

"I can get you into Mongolia, no problem," Karen said after hearing an abbreviated explanation of Ranma's problem. "But are you sure? Ranma, I know you're strong, but... fighting dragons?"  
The pigtailed man grimaced. "There's going to be as little fighting of dragons as I can manage; my target is this Greken jerk. K figures that he's actually charming the dragons somehow, so hopefully after I kill him, the lizards will split instead of trying to take revenge or anything." He grimaced despite himself. "Hopefully" was not a word that often worked out in his favor.  
Karen sensed his unease, and gently squeezed his shoulder, eager to regain the familiar closeness they had lost after so many years apart. "Whatever happens, I want you to know that you can always come to me. Israel owes you a lot, and I owe you a lot more. I'll pull whatever strings I have to; the IEF will always do everything in its power to assist you."  
Ranma blushed despite himself. "Thanks Karen. That means a lot to me."  
The sorceress nodded happily, though Ranma noticed that she didn't let go of his shoulder. "Hey, why don't we catch up tonight at dinner? We'll eat in my quarters! Just you and me!"  
"Uh... you and me?" Ranma asked a bit nervously. "Could Rayden come? I'm kinda afraid to leave him alone for... uh..." he gulped. "Karen? Why is my arm getting really cold?"  
Karen blinked innocently. "I have no idea, Ranma. Now, what was that about Rayden?"  
"I was just saying that Rayden's an adult demon and can get his own damn dinner without me to hold his hand," Ranma said quickly, proving that he wasn't nearly as slow as so many of his acquaintances claimed. Karen immediately let go of his shoulder, her face beaming.  
"Perfect! We'll have baked salmon, and-" the IEF colonel was cut off suddenly as her first subordinate interrupted her from behind.  
"I'm afraid that won't be possible tonight," Emrey said sharply as he glowered at the pigtailed man. He had shifted back into his "natural" form, which had the shape of a human, but with dark blue reptilian scales over his skin, and curved, pointed ears. His eyes glowed with unearthly white light, which added significantly to power of his unsettling gaze; or would have, surely, had Ranma been paying any attention to him.  
The rakshasa twitched as Karen glared at him and Ranma stared at something off in the distance. "You see, COLONEL Molsk must submit a complete report with General Kitinski regarding the assault and also launch an investigation as to the location of the remnants YOU scattered when you attacked." He smirked. "Oh, yes! And THEN there's the report detailing exactly who **you** are, why you interfered, and why we should redirect our resources to help you."

"Okay, I've decided I don't like him now," Kaze said as he eavesdropped on the conversation with the others.  
Rayden chuckled. "It's going to be SO cool when Ranma kicks his ass."  
Teema cocked its head to one side. "Shlek naw yuh yi?"  
Rayden blinked. "Tlei yuh? Nui wag uin plssgawah."  
"You speak that infernal language?" Kaze asked, amazed.  
"Yes, but the infernal's language is Tarrithol, not Gaerieth," Rayden explained to the complete confusion of the evon.  
"Stupid n00b," Yun murmured in Gaerieth, chuckling.

Karen growled at her subordinate, rounding on the rakshasa viciously. "Lieutenant Emrey, it's not your place to decide which reports I have to file and when. If you wish to become involved in those procedures, I'll happily delegate those tasks to you to free up my schedule."  
Emrey winced. "But General Kitinski-"  
"Can speak for herself, or transfer orders through her aides. I will not have my own subordinates assign tasks to me," the sorceress growled, causing the demon to flinch and shrink back a bit.  
It looked like she was going to continue, but she stopped when Ranma tapped her on the shoulder. "Hm?"  
Ranma had a very serious expression on his face as he pointed to a large shape off in the distance. It appeared past the point at which the forest gave way to burnt ashlands, and hung on the horizon as a very prominent beige, oval-shaped object. "What IS that? It must be gigantic!"  
Emrey snorted, and Karen smirked. "THAT is the heart of the IEF, Ranma. The home base of a constantly mobile modern military force, consisting of infantry battalions, armored brigades, and all varieties of air support. Haven't you ever wondered how a military strike force as strong as the IEF could travel around at its leisure in the wastes, miles from civilization, without once returning home for a full year since its deployment?"  
The pigtailed man blinked and scratched his head, not being nearly as familiar with large-scale military tactics as the career soldier. "Well... I heard they had some kinda high-tech ship or something. Maybe a carrier?"  
Karen nodded. "Yes, you could think of it as a carrier."  
"But... it's out in the middle of nowhere! Shouldn't it be, you know, in the ocean or something?"  
Emrey murmured something under his breath, and Ranma noticed that Karen glared at the demon before she answered. "The IEF is based on the dreadnaught-class hovercraft Messiah, also known as the Sandship Epsilon."  
Ranma's eyes bugged out, and he turned back around to stare at the shape. "A hovercraft! There's no way! That thing's almost as big as a football field!"  
"It's a bit bigger than a football field," the colonel said proudly. "And really, it's a bit of a mystery, too. I don't have the security clearance, so I don't know exactly where the Messiah came from, but rumors and basic engineering knowledge suggests that Israel found it rather than built it. It's our mobile base, and our home."  
"Wow... so this is what they were working on back when... er..." Ranma trailed off as he remembered that the particular information from THAT mission had been declared secret, and that he was in the presence of someone who would be very interested in that information.  
Karen looked startled. "What? Do you know something about it?"  
"No, no! It's just... um..." Ranma bigsweated as he looked around, searching for a method of distraction. "Hey, where's K?"  
"Hm? The metal dragon?" Karen looked around on the floor of the ship, and then turned around. "I don't know... wasn't he just here?"  
Emrey frowned as he fixed his eyes on a particular spot on the transport roof. "Strange... how did maintenance miss a hole in the roof?" he muttered.  
Ranma twitched as he stared at the small circle that had been chewed out of the solid steel plating of the transport. "This... is not good."  
_Bam! FSSSSST!_ The hovercraft began to shake as loud, alarming noises came from the section of the vehicle that housed its powerful engines and extremely important power plant.  
"Hey! The regulator! What're you doing with the regulatorA!" A voice shouted from below, much to the unease of those above.  
"What the hell? Is it some sort of scavenger demon?"  
"NO! Get away from that! Back off!" _Clang! Bang!_

More popping noises and high-pressure whistling sounds came from the hovercraft's precious machinery, and Ranma hung his head as his face darkened.  
"DAMN IT, K!"

End Chapter 11


	12. The Sandship Epsilon

Species: Yainemethorous Chitegan  
Common name: Juga  
Class: Demon  
Subspecies: None. A complete immunity to radiation over the reproductive lifespan has led to extremely low rates of mutation, and the asexual reproductive method of the species doesn't allow cross-breeding or selective mating. In effect, jugas are unaffected by evolutionary forces as we understand them.  
Sentience & Intelligence: Fairly intelligent. Jugas are capable of communication (limited by their unusual vocal chords) and planning, and even show decent mathematical and scientific capability. However, juga are typically very slow and ponderous, and generally yield quickly to the decisions of others.  
Physical biology: Although juga possess the same limb structure as a human, nearly all similarities end there. Juga do not breathe gases, and thus do not have lungs. The juga circulatory system is composed of sacs of "blood" that absorb energy to feed the surrounding cells; thus, juga have no hearts. Even their central nervous system was created through an entirely different evolutionary ladder (putting aside the fact for a moment that they defy evolutionary theory), and form a web of thickly packed, fibrous nerve clusters within the skull. The most obvious biological difference is in the exoskeleton (rated in terms of average protective quality to be on par with common tank armor), which is fused with the simplified, disjointed internal skeleton to aid movement without sacrificing protection. This exoskeleton is heavily ridged, with blade-like protrusions covering the various joints, and tends from a pale gray to charcoal black in color, depending on the particular diet of the juga.  
Mana resonance: Very low. Juga magi of any type are completely unheard of. It's unknown whether the mechanism for absorbing radiation is connected with the jugas' unusually low resonance; it's clear that radiation has a relationship with mana, but our studies concerning the interaction of those natural and magical forces are years, if not decades, from conclusive results.  
Lifespan: Around 300 years. Juga expire soon after the halon organ fails, as its body continues to attract various energies without any way to safely dispose of them.  
Diet: Lithovorous. Jugas' digestive tracts are made to break down minerals straight from the source: rocks and dirt. Animal and plant matter is instantly incinerated within a juga's body, and the useful materials are discarded in a lump of useless carbon compounds. Proteins are manufactured entirely from their base elements within the digestive system, resulting in a relatively slow regeneration rate (comparable to other demons and demonkin).  
Biological anomalies: Juga possess an organ called the halon organ, which is a large liver-shaped organ that would barely fit in a human's ribcage. This organ contains flexible webs of crystals which, when combined with the ichor filling the halon and the strange skin that protects the organ, is capable of absorbing numerous harmful energies and ejecting them out beneath the juga's dorsal spines without allowing contamination of the rest of the body. The primary energies of concern are heat and radiation; radiation in the alpha, beta, and gamma range are all attracted to the juga's exoskeleton, which emits an electromagnetic field from a separate organ, the impus cell. These energies enter the juga and are funneled, via means unknown, to the halon organ, which ejects the energy via several "waste veins" to ventilation pits beneath the dorsal spines. The same occurs with heat, although much of the energy is absorbed by the rest of the body while the excess heat (and thusfar it seems that no amount of heat can overcome this anomaly, including that created by nuclear reactions) is passed the same way. As an interesting note, on some occasions of heavy combat the heat from explosions and spells have caused "heat tunnels" to erupt behind enemy jugas, who are almost always on the front lines shielding the more vulnerable soldiers, and blast the less tolerant creatures behind them with more heat than they could withstand. It should be noted that while the halon organ can tolerate supposedly any level of excess heat, it has no way of regulating heat loss; although cold magic or weaponry will have to work through the juga's impressive internal temperature, they are effective.  
Reproductive type: Asexual. Jugas produce pre-fertilized (though the term means nothing in the context of their biology) eggs approximately every four or five years, usually in a pair. Jugas reach reproductive maturity around 25 years of age and typically experience their equivalent of menopause around age 200.  
Social structure: None. Juga have very little reason to stick together, and are famously inept at most domestic crafts due to their being very, very different from most beings, and having only their large, cumbersome claws to manipulate tools. As juga do not even raise their own young (unless compelled by others to do so) and do not mate, they usually feel no closer to their own kind than to any other given species. To this end, jugas are almost exclusively mercenary warrior monsters, as their strength and incredibly strong armor makes them invaluable vanguard soldiers, especially once the demonic armies found that their main concern in Earth Realm was deflecting bullets.  
Combat analysis: High. Juga are about as strong as one might guess from looking, and roughly ten times as tough as one might guess during the same look. Juga shells are extremely strong, but tend to yield to magical forces; without mithril-tipped munitions, the only way to kill a juga is large-bore depleted uranium shells or direct explosive blasts, usually via artillery or bombing strikes. Being battered by great kinetic force rarely does more than crack the carapace, but the internals of the juga are eventually shaken to the point that the various organs tear open and the creature dies of internal bleeding.  
Misc. notes: Juga are seen in much higher ratios among demonic armies in Earth realm as opposed to others, due to the demons' need to find soldiers capable of warding off gunfire. Though mithril-tipped bullets now allow regular soldiers to take down jugas with small arms fire (and a little luck), they remain as one of the more effective "battle beasts" usually encountered among enemy warbands. Jugas should therefore be fought carefully, or not at all; as a species, they are not particularly malicious or sadistic, and some are willing to fight alongside "good" forces for the same mercenary fee as they would charge darker masters.

US Research Division Omega - Survey File D711

Nexus II  
by Black Dragon the end of the semester! At last! FREEDOM! For... about a month... yay...  
I'd like to apologize in advance for all the sappy emotional crap I ended up writing in-between the refreshingly common descriptions of infantile comedy, gratuitous fanservice, and pointless violence. Sorry 'bout that. Chapter 12  
The Sandship Epsilon

"Commander, report. What's the status on the combat dispatch?"  
Next to the railing along the side of the massive hovercraft that was the Messiah, a tall, almost regal-looking woman stood looking out over the seemingly endless trenches of ash that made up the IEF's current base site. The woman was clearly an officer, and apparently a general, judging by the stars on her tasseled shoulder pads that were attached to a brilliant silver cape that hung around her. Other than that though, it would have been hard to tell, as she wore the same kind of sorceress' leotard that all the female magi soldiers of the IEF wore, though hers was a pearly white color rather than a camouflage pattern.  
Her hair was a long waterfall of almost ethereal silver, and gave the woman a seemingly divine appearance that was complimented by her tanned, golden skin; a shade not unattractive, but strangely alien.  
Many who met June Kitinski initially assumed she wasn't human. They were wrong. At least, they were wrong so long as they weren't religious or pacifist fanatics who considered her status as a magical super-soldier as making her some kind of monster. She was well-traveled and familiar with political circles, so she had met her fair share of both.  
At the moment the general and CO of the Israeli Expeditionary Force was staring at a construction machine her forces usually used for digging trenches and excavating. Right now it was using its considerable power to drag a transport - unfortunately designed to operate without wheels of any sort - through the dust and ash toward the Messiah.  
The man behind her cleared his throat. "The unit commanders report eighteen dead, twenty wounded. Captain Haritzki is amongst the wounded; impaled through the leg. He has requested honors be distributed to his men for what he views as 'heroism and excellence on the field' when they saved his life."  
General Kitinski snorted, but nodded. "See to it. Then find out the exact details of the ambush they ran into and report it to me. Haritzki's men may have saved his life, but his orders couldn't save his men. His actions may call for demotion." She hesitated. "Get a recommendation from Colonel Molsk, too. How was her battle performance?"  
"Exemplary results, as always. Some of the other officers question her methods, but none in her retinue was harmed during combat, and she has personally claimed thirty-six kills this mission. It should also be noted that she was quick to adapt to the change in orders and made peaceful contact with the third party found attacking the raiders."  
"I see. And what can you tell me about the third party?" June asked with a slight, professional curiosity in her voice.  
"Small 'adventuring' type of group. There's three of them, plus a small familiar or something that caused the transport breakdown. One human, one evon, and one demon. Supposedly they didn't suffer any losses when making the sneak attack on the raider camp, so it must be assumed that they're relatively powerful. I would assume they're mercenaries, though you'll have to question them or Colonel Molsk to get the details."  
"Fine." She glanced behind her at the commander. "Begin making funeral arrangements for the fallen, and send out a scavenger to pick up the wreck of the Vulture we lost. Medium security detail." She turned sharply and headed for the lower decks, her cape billowing out behind her from the movement.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ranma was impressed. Very impressed.  
Which wasn't really saying that much; Ranma had grown up in the wilderness even before he had been orphaned, living life without even the most common modern conveniences. Though he had served in some battles of the Death March, even then he hadn't seen many of the more impressive combat mecha and tanks.  
Such as it was, Ranma found examples of advanced technology simply breathtaking. Lasers, missiles, and ion engines all fascinated him utterly, although he never did have the patience to learn much about how they worked.  
Magic he found less impressive, as he had seen much more of that during his days spent surviving the attrition of demonic armies. He also considered the magical arts to be a series of effortless and simple tricks, creating something from nothing with a few unintelligible words and wave of the hands (he was wrong, and suspected as much, but no one had bothered to correct him). Technology, however, had to be made from the ground up from forces and materials as real and stable as the ground he stood on. The fact that technology was primarily the product of his home realm, as well as his own status as being magically invalid might have had something to do with it as well.  
So currently he was gaping at the lower transport bay within the Messiah, taking in the sight of numerous repair bays full of thick bundles of wires, sparking electric fields, and gigantic robotic arms that clamped onto the side of the damaged transport they had arrived on and dragged it into a pit with dozens of smaller arms that got to work tearing apart the damaged components. It was a marvel of automation, and really one of the less advanced and relevant examples of machinery aboard the vast hovercraft.  
If Ranma was impressed, then Kaze was floored. As a person of more intellectual pursuits by nature, being surrounded by armored tanks floating on anti-gravity thrusters and watching the huge automated welders and clamps in action was like Christmas (not that he had ever heard of the holiday).  
Rayden didn't really care, and was on his fourth bottle of brandy. He also had K gripped tightly in his free hand by the neck, which was the least painful and permanent method of restraining the troublemaking dragon that anyone was willing to accept (Rayden had actually defended K on this issue; he was the only one who found being wrecked due to an eaten engine block funny).

"I understand," Karen mumbled as she regarded a petty officer near the repair bay. "I'll take full responsibility for the damage, as I'm personally endorsing this party. Please ensure that I'm not selected for the security detail on the Vulture."  
The man nodded and saluted before leaving, and Karen turned expectantly toward her guests. Ranma and Kaze wore expressions typical of those visiting the Messiah for the first time, while the dark paladin was bored and approaching a good buzz. She brushed off the attitude; she never did really understand demons, despite being rather close friends with several.  
"Come, come, we can't leave you people gawking here in the loading bay," the colonel said in an amused tone of voice. "Garron, I'm assigning you to the security detail escorting the scavenger unit. Meet with Commander Givotz and see to it. Teema, Yun, you two have been requested again for guard duty on the main armory." Finally, she turned to Emrey, who was looking quite irritated and staring at the floor. "Leiutenant Emrey, make sleeping arrangements for our guests, would you?"  
The rakshasa glanced up at her, snuck a venomous glare toward the oblivious adventurers, and then nodded. "Yes Colonel. I'll see to it." He saluted properly and then scurried off behind the rest of Karen's retinue as they left to their assigned tasks.  
Karen smirked. She suspected Emrey would try something stupid like get Ranma housed in the storeroom or hide tacks in his bed, but it didn't matter. If she had anything to say about it, Ranma wouldn't be spending the night in his room.  
She quickly sobered to fight off a blush. It wasn't like her to take someone in and practically drag them into her bed like she was doing (not that she ever had to), but Ranma was a very special case.  
"So! Why don't I give you a tour of the ship?" Karen said brightly. Now that all her close associates were gone, all that was left was to ditch the maniac in the trench coat and the perverted evon.  
"Why don't you give me your report first?" Came a voice from behind her.

Karen flinched slightly from the surprise, but otherwise retained a perfectly neutral expression as she turned and saluted the silver-haired general. "General Kitinski. You've come to debrief me personally?"  
June nodded, not taking her eyes off the other sorceress to examine the newcomers. "I've heard most of the important details. What of this third party that was found attacking the raiders?"  
Karen stepped to the side and gestured to the men, obviously indicating that introductions should be made.  
The general kept her eyes locked on her subordinate. "I asked you a question, Colonel. Who are they, what were they doing at the combat site, and why are they here now?"  
Ranma shot Rayden a warning glance as he saw the larger man clench his fists angrily (much to K's relief, who could barely manage a choked gasp with his neck held so tightly).  
Rayden reluctantly relaxed. He had little appreciation for the entitlements of status and rank, and found it irritating that this new woman wouldn't speak to them directly, as if they were beneath her notice.  
Kaze didn't question the general's actions, used to the various grating mannerisms of those in high station. Also, he was busy discreetly comparing the sorceress's bodies.  
"Of course, General," Karen said with some hesitation. "They're a band of mercenaries who stumbled upon the raiders while attempting to travel north. This is Ranma Saotome, their leader," she beckoned to Ranma, and June finally gave the newcomers a good look. Her expression immediately darkened when falling upon Ranma, to which the young man only managed a surprised blink. "This is Kaze Toren, a representative of the Order of Malakai," she pointed to Kaze, who bowed respectfully. "And this is Rayden Shikodan, a representative of the Third Brotherhood of the Dark Cults. The metal dragon in his hand is called K; he's the one responsible for the breakdown of our transport en route."  
Karen expected surprise or consternation at the mention of Rayden's affiliation, but to her confusion, the IEF general was still staring at Ranma. She wouldn't have found this surprising (and would have found it irritating), except that the general's expression wasn't one of lust, admiration, or even casual interest. Instead, June Kitinski looked... annoyed.  
"Ranma Saotome..." June mumbled, her eye twitching. "It's been a long time."  
Ranma frowned and scratched his head, squinting at the exotic-looking woman. Then he brightened and snapped his fingers. "OH! I remember you! You're June! How ya doing?"  
The general's eye twitched. "I'm flattered you remember me. I was only your commanding officer on, what, seven missions? And this was only two years ago."  
"Somethin' like that," the wanderer answered flippantly. "And cut me some slack. You look pretty different since then. What'd you do to your hair, anyway? Did you bleach it or turn it into metal or something?"  
June began to simmer, and Karen quickly scooted up next to Ranma in a panic. "Ranma! What are you doing?" She hissed. June Kitinski wasn't a woman to piss off on the best of days. Besides being the single most powerful magi in the employ of Israel, she also happened to command an entire army of high-tech soldiers and weapons if she didn't feel like putting forth the effort to destroy something herself. Ranma could be put to death right then and there, and the only repercussions for General Kitinski would be some paperwork.  
Ranma waved off his friend. "So you're a general now, eh? Done pretty well for yourself?"  
"Yes. Yes, I'd say I have," June said through clenched teeth. "And you... are still a common mercenary I see. Though you at least have lackeys now."  
"Yeah, I've done alright," Ranma said conversationally, either not noticing or not indulging her attitude. "So, June! Do you run this ship? It looks nice!"  
Before June could continue shooting heated barbs at Ranma so that he could continue ignoring them (Karen had seen this event played out before, though never with the general), the sandy-haired woman interrupted. "Ranma, how do you know the general?" 'PLEASE don't tell me they slept together and she's upset about him leaving...'  
Said general was the one to answer. "Ranma Saotome is a well-regarded mercenary infiltrator," she began, "and participated in several raids with my commando squadron."  
Ranma nodded while smiling. "Yup. You were a captain then, though."  
"Okaaaay..." Karen drawled. While she was greatly relieved that their relationship was entirely professional (at least on the surface), it didn't explain why her superior seemed to find Ranma's presence intolerable or why Ranma didn't reciprocate those feelings to any degree.  
Apparently, June didn't intend for her to find out. "So Saotome, what WERE you doing in the raider camp, and why are you here now?"  
"Eh, we were just passing through, saw the bandits, and figured we could do some good and catch some cash by killing them," Ranma answered, shrugging. "Then Karen shows up outta nowhere, and wants to talk, but she's in the middle of this mission. So we go along with her and here we are." He left out the expectation of being transported to where they were going; June would figure out they had a destination and would either arrange for it, or boot them off the sandship so that they could get back to walking there.  
June shot a look at Karen, then turned her attention back to Ranma. "Saotome, how do you know the Colonel?" She said, mirroring Karen's earlier question.  
The response that followed was entirely different, however, as Ranma and Karen both flushed badly. Ranma immediately clammed up and began tugging on his pigtail as he shied away from the general's gaze.  
Karen managed to stutter out a response. "We w-were on some combat detail together!" She blurted out. "N-Not commando m-missions or anything, but we're... uh... we're old friends!"  
June's eyebrow twitched again. "'Old friends.' Right." She didn't need psychic powers to pick up the tension and guess its likely cause.  
Karen noted that June was now glaring openly at Ranma, but hadn't bothered her with even a visual reprimand. Odd.  
"Very well. I understand the situation, and extend the hospitality and protection of the IEF to you and your friends for as long as you may need it," she said in tired voice, clearly indicating that she thought of this whole procedure as a wasteful chore.  
"Cool! Thanks June!" Ranma said brightly, walking up and giving the general a friendly pat on the shoulder.  
June considered vaporizing his arm as a warning against touching her, but decided against it. "You're welcome. Colonel, see to their arrangements and then get to work on your reports. That is all."  
"Ma'am!" Karen said stiffly, saluting.  
June swatted Ranma's hand off her shoulder, then stopped to give his companions a disdainful look before she turned and headed for the stairs, looking every bit the part of a queen touring her palace.

Ranma noticed that a lot of tension left Karen once her superior was out of sight. "What's the matter? You seem kinda wound up."  
The colonel twitched, but calmed herself rather than exploding at him. 'What was he thinking, addressing the general by her first name, and patting her on the shoulder like a frat brother? No wonder she doesn't like him!' Karen, personally, found his rough, informal nature all the more endearing, but was well aware that most figures of authority would not.  
"Never mind that. I'm fine now. Should we begin the tour? By the time we're done, it will probably be time for dinner." Her tension faded further as a mischievous glint entered her eye.  
Ranma remembered his previous obligation, and beckoned Rayden over to him before whispering in his ear.  
The dark paladin's bored expression didn't change, and he nodded absently. "Sure, I'll do that." Then he stepped up to Karen. "Where're the kitchens?"  
Karen pointed uncertainly toward a set of stairs on the other end of the transport bay. "Near the aft of the ship. Take the stairs there, pass the munitions shops and take a left. Why?"  
Without answering her question, he mumbled "Thanks," and left for the aforementioned stairs, K still held firmly in his hand. Karen noticed that in his other hand, he had taken Ranma's pack. Strange.  
She shook her head. "Well, whatever. Shall we begin?"

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The sandship Epsilon was a titanic cruiser made out of a fragmented hull of some type and retrofitted with massive anti-gravity boosters. If one were to take a detailed analysis of the craft's body (and many had done so), one would conclude that the ship was clearly made to fly, and that the topside shielding, composed of numerous triangular chunks of mysterious metals suspended atop scaffolds and columns in awkward, uneven layers, was made of shattered pieces of the ship's original hull that had been somehow damaged.  
Among the ship's crew and military compliment, some of which had been on the craft since its departure from Israel, the number of people who could explain these oddities could be counted on one hand with fingers left to spare. The number of people who WOULD explain them under any circumstances less severe than the cruelest torture or complete mind control was zero.  
Ironically, on the Messiah there was one person who WASN'T with the IEF who knew these secrets, and would have divulged them with a little bit of smooth talking, probably without even realizing it. But nobody who was interested could have possibly guessed that the rough young man with the rusty old sword knew anything about it.  
Nonetheless, there was only so much about a stadium-sized hovercraft that one could feasibly resign to secrecy, so Karen had no shortage of material to divulge as she led a fascinated Ranma and Kaze around on the topside deck.

"Every twenty meters is stationed a vulcan cannon emplacement for warding off air attacks," she explained, pointing to one of the heavily armored turrets and huge cylindrical barrel poking out of its wide shield. "Because many flying beasts and demons don't have signatures that missiles can easily track, most of the Messiah's weapons systems are direct fire systems. Though it does boast an impressive compliment of cruise missiles and even a pair of thermonuclear short-range ballistic missiles."  
Ranma's eyes bugged out slightly. Kaze leaned toward him.  
"Pst! What's a 'thermonuclear' missile?"  
"Technological superweapon. City-destroying type of stuff," Ranma whispered back. Kaze nodded in understanding, looking suitably impressed.  
"There are five magi-cannons mounted along the main hull; four for firing on ground targets, and the fifth mounted topside for attacking large air targets. They use crystal relays and an imprinted magic circle to turn fairly weak lasers into light lances. The impact force is estimated at eighteen times that of a typical 120mm. cannon," Karen explained, pointing to a large sphere-mounted turret being held up by several scaffolding towers.  
Next, the sorceress pointed to the most obvious weapon of the Messiah; a tremendous artillery cannon that was mounted on a raised platform near the aft of the ship, with a barrel so long that it poked out above the scattered armor shields that covered the top deck, even at a slight angle. "This is the N-117 artillery cannon, though a lot of the crew calls it the 'Doomgun' or..." she hesitated for a moment in slight embarrassment as she prepared to utter the second name, "the 'Ubercannon'."  
Kaze raised an eyebrow. "Interesting name. I like it."  
"Glad to hear it," Karen mumbled. "It's an artillery gun to fire off experimental large warheads being developed in our labs: poison gas shells, cluster bombs, high-yield firebombs, as well as a number of magitech weapons such as large shield disruptors. Our current project is to find a way to launch a shell that projects an anti-magic field over a wide area."  
"What's the huge glowing crystal tower?" Ranma asked, pointing to a spire composed of a large metal column with a great number of crystal shards emerging from the sides and slowly rotating, as well as a titanic gemstone at the top that resembled a blue diamond and crackled with electricity.  
"That's the shield construct. It generates two energy fields: one that encompasses the ship and another independent field that envelops the shielding unit in particular. The redundancy system aims to prevent damage to the construct if the main shield falls under heavy bombardment and fails, since it's probably the most delicate and sophisticated device on board."  
Ranma looked around the massive ship, deeply impressed. He had seen the Messiah a few years ago as a set of ruins settled below a vast labyrinth at the bottom of the Dead Sea, but back then it resembled just that: an ancient, crumbling structure of rusted metal.  
"So whaddya need all this stuff for, anyway?" Ranma finally asked. "I mean, do you just cruise around killing bandits all the time? What does the IEF **do**?"  
Karen nodded at the common question. "We're sort of an all-purpose autonomous attack force for... well, 'justice and humanity,' I suppose you could say. As controversial as the idea is to some people, we're a military force dedicated to wiping out malevolent groups to promote peace and order in these regions."  
Ranma understood that easily enough, though he didn't get why such an idea would be "controversial." To anyone who had grown up in the wastes, killing to prevent unnecessary bloodshed was as natural and sensible as hunting.  
"We also carry out large contracts and engage in skirmishes with local powers that are determined to be a threat to the nearby nations. Battling against the demon lords is tricky, so we rarely attack them directly, but very few demon lords have the power to keep us from razing assets and holdings away from their home bases and manipulating the balance of power however we need to."  
Then Karen frowned. "Actually, I'm kind of curious about this Greken fellow. Commanding more than a few dragons is no mean feat, and if he was able to amass even a dozen of them, it should have given him a red flag as far as the Japanese Empire is concerned. Strange that I haven't really heard of him."  
"I imagine his ownership of the dragons is usually reduced to 'myth' status outside of his own territories," Kaze theorized, rubbing his chin. "Personally, I can't imagine how he commands them myself. I wouldn't be inclined to believe that the serpents followed Greken's direct command if it weren't for the fact that they seem to be actively hunting Master Saotome. That many dragons in an area could otherwise be chalked up to a great number of dragon nests or a dragon lord with an unusually large harem. The idea that all of them are working for a minor demon lord, and without killing each other over territory or mates, is truly unusual."  
Ranma shrugged. "Well, we'll probably figure it out once we find him. If we don't all get eaten first or something." Then he held a hand over his head as he stared out toward the bow of the ship. "So you have fighters and stuff, right? What kind of army can this thing carry around?"  
Karen smiled proudly. "The Messiah carries a normal complement of six thousand soldiers, a crew of eight hundred, and a vehicular force of twenty aircraft, thirty grav tanks, ten skimmers, and around eighty assorted mecha, from scouts to artillery units. We're the most powerful fighting force of our size in the world."  
"At least until the Americans manage to copy your designs and build a force just like it," Kaze said off-hand.  
Karen sweatdropped. "Uh... well... yeah. Pretty much." She didn't really have anything to say to that. Trying to keep up with America militarily was just impossible. "Any other questions, or should I move on to the labs?"  
Kaze raised his hand. "Is there a place about the craft that serves alcohol?"  
Karen didn't drink much herself other than wine, but had been asked the question often enough that she knew the answer by heart. "Two levels down those stairs and to the right. There'll be a sign. As a guest, you can use the officer's lounge instead of the soldier's if you'd like." Really, she had been expecting to send Rayden there before he left for the kitchen. 'I wonder what he's doing down there, anyway?'

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General Kitinski stalked down the hallways of the lower decks of the Messiah, her expression a mix of sulking and fuming.  
It was her habit that, whenever she was annoyed with no obvious solution to the subject of her irritation, she put her mind off of it by performing monotonous, mostly useless tasks. In this case, the task was a surprise inspection of the heavy machinery in the bowels of the Messiah.  
The crew frankly hated these inspections, not because they were usually ill-prepared, but because the general was almost invariably in a bad mood when they occurred. Thus she had gained quite a fierce reputation for being exceptionally hard on her maintenance crews and throwing fits over ridiculously small details, when in fact she didn't know the first thing about the machines' operation and was completely satisfied so long as they weren't visibly on fire.  
The various mechanics and engineers all fought to keep tired and beleaguered expressions off their faces as the golden-skinned woman stalked past them. Some of them were even openly leering at the general's undeniably skimpy outfit, as they had learned long ago that ogling her didn't annoy the super-soldier nearly as much as looking put upon by her presence.  
Luckily for those men and women, before June could get very far in her inspection, the door at the end of the engine block burst open, and a young private rushed through.  
He jerked to a stop and saluted stiffly as the general turned toward him. "General Kitinski, Ma'am! We have a situation in the kitchens! One of the guests threw out all the cooks, and..." he gulped as he realized that the woman in front of him was probably a little high on the power ladder to be bothered with minor disturbances like this, especially when she appeared to be in the middle of something. "Uh... well, I just rushed off to tell the first officer I could find, and-"  
"I see," June interrupted, looking quite interested. "Very well. I'll attend to it personally. Thank you Private, you are dismissed." Turning away from the shocked soldier, she waved neglectfully at the maintenance crews. "The inspection will have to wait for another day. As you were." Turning back around to follow the private to the kitchens, she missed the various relieved looks on the engineers, mixed with some winces for whatever poor bastard had just attracted the general's wrath.

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Said poor bastard was holding an old man in a chef's outfit up by the front of his shirt when June found him, a metal dragon perched on his shoulder and obviously trying to mediate the situation without success.  
"For the last time, old man! Stop buggin' me!" Rayden growled, holding a butcher knife in his free hand instead of his sword. That it had no blood on it was reassuring, but the dark paladin looked intimidating under any circumstances.  
The head cook, either assuming that a guest of the IEF would never actually harm a member of the Messiah's crew or just too stubborn to care, growled right back. "I'll stop yellin' at'cha when ya git outta mah kitchen, yeh filthy vagrant!"  
Rayden frowned, then glanced at K. "Vagrant is an insult, right? It sounds like an insult. Especially with 'filthy' tacked on in front."  
K grimaced. "Please, DON'T provoke him. Look, can't you both use the kitchen?"  
"I need the space! And all those cooks runnin' around keep getting in my way and moving the materials!" Rayden complained.  
"I'll not have yah rats in MAH kitchen! Git out!" protested the chef with far more vigor.

June took stock of the situation, then stepped forward and snapped her fingers.  
If the finger snap didn't attract attention on its own, then the small but powerful burst of force that detonated around Rayden's hand and separated the two men did the trick. All eyes turned to her, and the head cook and various other crew all snapped to attention.  
"I take it there's a problem here?" June asked calmly, eyeing Rayden with a cool glare.  
The dark paladin frowned. That blast had barely stung his hand, but he was moderately impressed by the woman's casual accuracy with an unincanted spell. "Yeah, there is. You're in charge, right?"  
"Yes, I'm in charge," June drawled. "So what's the problem?"  
"It's right here," Rayden said, picking up the cook again before he could protest. "Here. You deal with it." Without further warning, he casually tossed the cook into the sorceress's arms.  
Or that was the idea, anyway. Instead, before the shocked crew (and a mortified metadragon), the head cook flew through the air in an arc toward the silver-haired general... before slamming into an energy field and bouncing off onto the floor, groaning.  
Rayden didn't seem to care about this outcome, and took a moment to dust off his trench coat before turning back into the main kitchen and closing the door behind him.

June frowned. "It would seem Saotome keeps some rather unpleasant company," she mused aloud.  
Below her, the cook blubbered incoherently, unsure if he should apologize for the situation or complain about being deflected like a common projectile.  
Without waiting for the man to gather himself, June stepped forward and headed into the kitchen.

"I get the distinct feeling that we're very, very dead," K murmured nervously.  
Rayden ignored him, quite used to hearing that particular sentiment from other people who tagged along with him. At the moment he was busy chopping up huge blocks of meat and slathering a marinade on them from a bowl close by. Other hunks of meat were arrayed about the multiple counters, along with chopped vegetables and other materials awaiting his attention.  
When the door to the kitchen opened again, Rayden growled and turned toward the entrance, expecting that it was the head cook again.  
He was only slightly less irritated that it was General Kitinski instead. "Oh. What do YOU want?"  
June raised an eyebrow. "First, I'd like to know what you're doing."  
Rayden gave her an annoyed look. "What does it look like I'm doing? Alchemy? I'm cooking! Now scram! I'm busy here!"  
As the dark paladin turned back around, K chuckled nervously. "I'd just like to point out that our activities here are technically harmless and well-meaning... and that I neither agree with or condone Rayden's sentiments."  
"Noted," June drawled as she walked up to Rayden's back. "Mister Shikodan, as you're no soldier of mine I can only demand the most indirect and basic modicum of respect from you. However, I couldn't help but notice that you seem to take issue with me."  
Rayden turned around and glared down at the silver-haired woman. "And I couldn't help but notice that you're still here bothering me instead of leaving. What's up with that?"  
June frowned as she stared up, not liking the way the demonic soldier towered over her. "Very well. It appears diplomacy has failed. On to violence." Then she poked him in the chest. "Disintegration."  
_FOOM!_ There was a bright flash of light, and Rayden let out a strangled cry as he felt every cell in his body simultaneously try to tear itself apart.  
When the light had abated completely, June blinked at the charred man who was still glaring down at her.  
_Hack!_ Rayden coughed up some smoke, and then his eyes narrowed at the woman below him. "That hurt, you know."  
Then he slowly teetered forward, prompting the sorceress to step out of the way as he fell flat onto the floor. _Whump!_  
June looked mildly surprised. "Odd. I'm used to things dying when I use that spell."  
K winced at the confirmation that, yes, the woman had just tried to kill one of his companions for a minor offense. K hoped that this experience would teach Rayden a little more about the value of politeness... but he doubted it. "Rayden's damn near invulnerable. But that aside, we're not trying to step on any toes here. Maybe you could let him off with a reprimand? Aside from already trying to kill him, I mean?"  
The silver-haired sorceress planted one foot on the small of Rayden's back. "I suppose that can be arranged. Shikodan, you seem to have an innate problem with authority. Well, other than Saotome, for some reason I can't begin to fathom. As I've already noted, you're not one of my soldiers, so there's no need for me to attempt to correct this behavior. However, you WILL get out of this kitchen so that my crew can get back to work, and you WILL restrain yourself when we meet in the future. Is that clear?"  
Rayden coughed again, then glared at her from his position on the floor. "Bite me."

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From outside the kitchen entrance, the head cook was wringing his hat nervously as the other crew members huddled around him, each one sneaking occasional glances toward the kitchen.  
"Didja see 'at flash? She musta blahsted the fool!" the head cook said anxiously. He obviously had a conflict with the demon knight, but the man had been a guest of the IEF, and he had just been vaporized for a petty squabble that the cook had refused to compromise on. "I don' think we should still be'ere when the general comes out!"  
Another cook frowned dubiously. "I think we should just wait so we can get right back to work. Otherwise we'll have to use the secondary kitchens and break open more of the dried foods." Obviously, he didn't think nearly as much of the intruder's death as his supervisor did. "She'll be done any second in there. If she was careful, we won't even have to clean up!"  
The head cook glared at the man for his flippant attitude. "Idiot! I'll not be around the general when she stahts zappin' fools for harsh language!"  
Another crew member, this one a dishwasher, looked worried. "Well, she wouldn't hurt any of us on a whim, would she?"  
_FOOM! FOOM! FOOM!_ All the crew members flinched back as multiple flashes of light came from the kitchen.  
"OW!! Knock it off, you crazy bitch!" _BLAMMO!_ "GRK!"  
The crew members around the head cook suddenly seemed much more nervous.  
"You know, I really DO have other things to do besides standing around here."  
"I guess the secondary kitchen isn't so bad."  
"I always did like canned food."  
"Let's get the hell outta here."

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June frowned at the smoking, blackened mass that lay twitching beneath her, quite annoyed that it was still twitching, and thus obviously alive.  
"As soon as I can feel something in my body other than BLINDING PAIN, you'll pay for that," Rayden said in a fairly strained, high-pitched voice.  
The sorceress sighed and ran a hand back through her long, silver hair. "Save the threats. If you won't die or give up by now, then have it your way. Assuming you regain some sort of muscle control soon, you may use the kitchen for as long as you want."  
K sweatdropped. "You're letting him off the hook just like that?"  
"Leaving someone after four attempted disintegrations and a blast press is hardly letting them off the hook," June deadpanned as she turned away and headed toward the exit. "Frankly, if he's that hard to kill, it's far too much effort for me to expend for such a minor offense, and I can see no other way to get him to listen to me. Besides, now that I think about it, Saotome may take it quite badly to hear that I'd killed one of his teammates without good cause."  
K mulled this over, noting with great interest that the general, who had just tried to casually destroy a Dread Knight, was slightly worried about raising Ranma's ire.  
June was about to exit, but stopped for a moment at the door to give a final disdainful glance at the charred mess of a man on the floor. "It really figures that all of Saotome's companions would be as annoying and resilient as he is."  
The metadragon shrugged helplessly, hoping that her criticism didn't extend to him as well. He knew he had a reputation for being annoying, but metal carapace or not, he had no idea just how resilient he was, and had no desire to find out.

After the general had left in mild annoyance, Rayden's hand rose up and clenched the edge of the table, slowly pulling up the rest of his smoldering body.  
Once he was more or less standing (using the counter as support), he weakly raised his other hand with his index and middle finger in a "V".  
K rolled his eyes. "You call that a victory?"  
The Dread Knight coughed a few times, and then nodded. "I was so ridiculously tough that a master sorceress got tired of trying to kill me and let me have my way. How is that NOT a victory?"  
"Putting aside the fact that it looks like she got really, really close..." the metadragon mused, "well, it just doesn't seem like the kind of win a warrior would be proud of."  
"Beside the point. Besides, it wasn't a real battle or anything," he reasoned, leaving out the obvious fact that it probably would have been if he hadn't been completely incapacitated right away. Then he started stretching himself like he did every time he was beaten nearly to death, leaving K to wince at the loud cracks and popping noises. "Man, she's pretty strong though! I really underestimated her!"  
K flew over next to him as Rayden steadied himself without using the counter, and then picked up the kitchen knives so that he could resume his cooking. "Does that mean you won't piss her off next time you see her?" He asked. Sometimes K really wondered how the mess of tangled up wires that was Rayden's brain really worked.  
"Eh. Maybe," the dark paladin considered, chopping up some onions. "Well, not on purpose, I guess."  
"Dandy," K mumbled. "Have you ever considered that a slight change in attitude and mannerisms might result in you getting almost killed less often?"  
"Sure," the demon knight said as he pushed the onions aside into a bowl of oil. "But then I think about how bothersome changing is, and decide that I don't really mind almost dying that much."  
"So you'd rather be lying in a pool of your own blood than show token respect to a stuck-up, self-important magi," the metadragon asked for clarification.  
"Naturally," Rayden rubbed his chin for a moment and then poked the tiny dragon in the side. "Hey, make yourself useful and find me some liquor, okay?"  
"Don't you always carry some around with you?"  
"Well, sure, but I wanna save that stuff if I can take someone else's booze."  
K looked up at him dubiously. "So do you want it to drink, or to put in the food?"  
"To put on some of the deeper second-degree burns," Rayden clarified. 'Damn disintegrations... the worst part is that they hurt WORSE when they don't work.'  
K sighed. "Yeah, okay. Be right back."

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Lieutenant Emrey fumed as he peeked around the hallway corner to watch the couple moving throught the ship and glancing through the weapons labs.  
Karen had been sadly mistaken if she thought that a task like arranging lodging would distract him for any meaningful period of time. Besides the fact that it was easily delegated to anyone who would stand to take orders from the rakshasa (which most of the soldiers of lower rank would, even if they grumbled about it a lot), it wouldn't have taken very long even if he had bothered to do it himself.  
So he had had ample time to finish his task and then scout around the ship for his commanding officer. And lo and behold, when he found her, she had already ditched the non-human adventurers and had her arm hooked around the elbow of the pigtailed man that led the vagrants.  
"Look at them!" He growled irritably. "Strolling down the hall arm in arm like a couple at the park! Pfeh!"  
Obviously, the shape-shifter felt that Ranma was taking obscene advantage of Karen's apparent feelings for him. They had gone their separate ways years ago, and yet the moment he was back in the picture, she was all over him. As opposed to Emrey himself, who had stood by her side and taken her orders for over a year, constantly showering her with affection and support (in both a tactical and emotional sense), yet was kept at arms length, unable to breach the barrier of "friend." It was a disgusting state of affairs.  
And the filthy wanderer just tried to play it cool, pretending like nothing was happening, and betraying only cordial interest in the gorgeous sorceress. No doubt the wanderer would lay her and happily leave her just the next day, just like... just like...  
Well, just like he did to other women. Not because he was a womanizing slimeball, of course, but because he already had someone in mind for a committed relationship. Unlike this Ranma guy.  
The question was what to do about it. He knew that they had planned to have dinner together, which would most likely lead to a long, erotic encounter to be repeated several times until they finally booted the wanderers off the ship. How to ruin that plan without being blamed for it?  
Simply attacking the pigtailed worm was right out. Putting aside the fact that the man seemed to have a certain perpetual battle-readiness to him that set Emrey on edge, he wasn't quite so jealous that he would kill or even permanently injure him without provocation.  
General Kitinski might be inclined to interrupt them, if he could find her and convince her to do so. He had seen the encounter between Karen and June, and noticed, like everyone else who wasn't blind, the obvious irritation and distaste with which the general treated Ranma. Of course, he had no clue what the source of that enmity was, but his talents lied in uncovering things like that and using it to his advantage.  
'Yes, General Kitinski's my best bet. If I can convince her to bring in Karen for a comprehensive report or night detail, that would put off their plans for the night. Tomorrow I can work on getting those adventurers off the ship.'

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Emrey had numerous tools at his disposal for a task such as this. Deception and misdirection was his element as surely as furious destruction was Rayden's.  
As a rakshasa, he possessed the ability to shapeshift, could mimic voices with ease, sense another creature's emotions and read their surface thoughts, and had his share of minor enchantment spells to help people see things his way. Ordinarily convincing someone that they should occupy a woman's time to prevent her from being alone with a certain man would be no major feat from someone of his cunning and abilities.  
There was the slight concern that he would be trying to manipulate the general in command of the IEF. June Kitinski's general opinion of demons didn't change as much as one would hope whether those demons were actively trying to kill her or do their best to serve her. The biggest factor that kept her from vaporizing the members of Karen's retinue was the effort it would take to find them (as they tended to avoid the light sorceress), do the actual disintegrating, and then deal with the whining and enmity from Colonel Molsk herself.  
So if he was going to convince the general of anything, he figured that he'd either need to be disguised and extremely careful not to be detected, or he'd need to get the general really, really drunk.  
He was quite surprised when he peeked into the officer lounge and saw that the silver-haired sorceress was already halfway into plan B.  
General Kitinski was known for being extremely level-headed, though rather cold when it came to non-humans. She could take on nearly any situation with a calm, regal demeanor that lesser officers, including Karen herself, envied deeply. Many didn't like how she could keep that calm, regal demeanor while blasting a light lance through an imp diplomat while declaring her refusal to negotiate with monsters, but her attitude wasn't particularly unusual.  
Seeing the general miserably slumped over a bar with a shot glass in her hand like a woman who'd just been cheated on by her husband... well, Emrey was tempted to take photographs just for the novelty of the situation.  
The rakshasa, estimating that either she'd be more receptive to a non-human's advice when she was drunk, or at least too uncoordinated to activate and aim her spells, moved to sit next to her, only to see - much to his annoyance - the evon man from before take the seat before he could even get across the room.

"Hello there!" Kaze said cheerfully as he sat down next to the general, a wide smile on his face in contrast to the woman's mute sulking expression. Turning to the barkeep, who was keeping a fair distance from the woman, he snapped his fingers. "Double scotch on the rocks, please. Put it on Saotome's tab."  
June raised an eyebrow, but said nothing, not even turning to look at the man who had greeted her.  
The barkeep frowned. "Who's Saotome?"  
"The fellow in charge of my expenses," Kaze answered. "Not to worry. He's a friend of the general here." He jabbed a thumb at the silver-haired woman.  
The barkeep tensed. "Uh... you don't say... General Kitinski?"  
The woman still didn't bother turning. "I know him."  
That was good enough for the man behind the counter, who quickly backed off to get the evon's drink.  
"So, you look perfectly miserable!" Kaze said conversationally, clearly trying to engage the woman in conversation. "Wanna talk about it?"  
Finally, June straightened and looked over at the man sitting next to her. "I tried to destroy your demon friend in the kitchen."  
Kaze nodded sagely. "Yes, I heard. It would seem you failed, too. Don't feel too bad; as you might imagine, everybody who's tried to kill him thusfar has failed as well. And by my estimation that's quite a collection of attempts."  
June's eyes narrowed. "So, tell me: what's keeping me from disintegrating **you**?"  
Kaze thanked the bartender as he was handed his drink, then turned back to the sorceress. "Magic shield."  
The general snorted. "I could break through that."  
"Yes, I suppose you could," the evon answered without a hint of anxiety.  
The two stared at each other for a moment, and then June gave a disgusted grunt before slamming back her drink. "Another!" She snapped before turning back to Kaze. "Look, I'm going to be perfectly frank with you: I'm more tolerant toward pointy-ears and clowns than I am toward... hmm... whatever the hell the big guy is, but I still don't like your kind."  
Kaze nodded in understanding, ignoring the racial slurs referring to elves and evons, respectively. "Yes, yes, I figured as much. We all have our prejudices. Personally, I have no favor with elves myself. But enough about me, let's talk about you." Before she could voice any protest, he took a quick sip of his drink and continued. "You obviously take issue with Saotome. However, this irritation is clearly not mutual, nor is it serious enough that you're willing to leverage your considerable personal power to cause him harm or discomfort. Despite this, the problem is severe enough that it weighs on your mind, and causes you to seek inebriation - which, by the tense and confused expressions of the other individuals in the lounge, is a rather unusual occurrence."  
June looked slightly overwhelmed, and turned away from the evon. "You're... very perceptive." Seeing that the barkeep had refilled her glass when she wasn't looking, she picked up the glass, then hesitated.  
Kaze pretended not to notice her indecision. "So I must ask: what is the situation between you and Master Saotome?"  
Frowning, June took a small sip instead of downing the whole shot, and glared distastefully at the evon. "You don't need to know that."  
"Of course I don't," Kaze said calmly. "If I did, I would have just asked Master Saotome himself to describe his relationship with you, and then divulged the answer by filling in the gaping holes left by his staggering social ineptitude. I'm far more interested in talking to you than I am in satisfying idle curiosity."  
The sorceress stared at him guardedly, unsure of what to make of that statement. "Are... Are you hitting on me?"  
"Well, duh," Kaze deadpanned, taking another long sip of scotch.  
June schooled her features. "If for no other reason, you should be commended for your honesty. But I am an IEF general, and-"  
"And I don't really care," Kaze interrupted with a wave of his hand. "That's what you do for a living, and it's great. But it doesn't make you any less of a woman, nor does it make you 'off-limits' to irreverent scoundrels such as myself."  
The sorceress's jaw worked silently as she groped for something to say.  
"Oh, I know how it is," the cleric said gently, patting the stunned woman on the shoulder. "You're a woman in a position of great responsibility usually held by men. As if that doesn't make you insecure enough, you've undergone artificial magitech enhancement to give yourself unnatural powers that human science is only beginning to understand. Over time, you forget that being respected and feared are entitlements of your position to be observed by enemy and subordinate and not by the world in general. You cease being a human being, in need of understanding and love, and become a simple war machine, who needs only approval and admiration. Deep inside, you know something's wrong, that something is eating away at you, but you're afraid to embrace the weak, vulnerable creature you used to be. You're afraid to lose the respect and power. Afraid to risk. Afraid to trust. Afraid to love." Shrugging, he turned back to his drink and finished it off. "It doesn't help that you're surrounded by men who are terrified of invoking your wrath, and that you have a reputation for magically powered objections to unprofessional and disrespectful conduct. But you feel that changing your ways to attract men betrays your obvious strength, and inevitably you keep any willing suitor at arm's length. I've seen it before."  
June was staring at him bug-eyed, and her shot glass slowly slipped down out of her frozen grip. Luckily, she was holding it just a few inches above the bar, so it hardly spilled a drop, but the slight sound broke her out of her stupor. Still stunned, she turned around to stare at the back of the bar as the evon's speech swirled around in her alcohol-addled mind.

Finally, after nearly a minute of silence, she turned back toward the white-haired man. "Well... if you intended to seduce me, I think that pretty much did it."  
"Excellent!" Kaze said happily, moving his hand from the sorceress's shoulder to around her waist. "However, I AM rather curious as to the situation with Master Saotome."  
"Ah. That," June mumbled as she leaned into the evon's shoulder. Some part of her mind screamed in panic that every other officer in the lounge was probably watching and gaping as a near-stranger openly wormed his way into her panties, but the inebriated sectors of her brain, as well as the parts thoroughly engrossed in mulling over Kaze's speech silenced it. "It's nothing, really. I mean, it's something, but it's my problem, not his."  
"I supposed as much. Something about Ranma bothers you, but there's no actual conflict that he's aware of... which probably annoys you more," Kaze guessed.  
"EXTREMELY perceptive," June murmured. "Well, there are basically two issues here. You know what you said about me being insecure?"  
The evon nodded silently, this time letting her go ahead without interjecting any of his psychically attuned observations.  
Picking up her drink, the silver-haired general finished it off and then put the glass aside. "I'm thirty-six. I'm, as you pointed out, a woman, and a two-star general. Through sheer bloody-minded effort and not a little bit of political sniping, I managed to make this rank before middle age and get myself assigned as the head of the most sophisticated and advanced military force on the face of the planet." She sighed. "Colonel Karen Molsk is one rank below me in magic power. She's made Colonel at age NINETEEN. She doesn't know the first thing about politics, isn't even half as self-conscious as I am, and has even refused a promotion once because it would have taken her off the front lines during the Death March."  
"I see," Kaze mumbled. "Her success, seemingly without the ambition normally required, threatens you?"  
"A little," the sorceress admitted. "It certainly helps that she takes orders from me." Then she scowled. "That's Colonel Molsk. Then we have Saotome."  
She fumed for a moment, wishing that she had ordered another drink to guzzle down at that point. "When I first met him he was just fourteen years old. FOURTEEN! I had been serving Israel for decades, seen close friends and family brutally killed, and led soldiers to crushing victories as well as agonizing deaths."  
She scooted her stool over so that she didn't have to lean over as far to rest on Kaze's shoulder, and ignored the whispers coming from the other people in the lounge. "I was the commanding officer for a commando squad for a long time. We were pretty busy, since the demonic armies kept launching frequent, disorganized assaults against our defenses, which kept our regular forces too occupied to launch a proper counter-attack, even if the losses the enemy incurred as compared to us were devastating. Commando units were used to destroy demon nests which kept springing up in the urban ruins and trying to reinforce the local armies, as well as killing enemy mages who frequently led the more effective assaults and were personally responsible for eighty percent of the actual damage to our defenses."  
June sighed. "So there I was, a grizzled, ambitious soldier taking on near-suicidal missions into the very lairs of creatures straight out of our worst nightmares, all for the sake of the safety of my country. And then I get a kid assigned to my command." Her eye twitched. "A little boy whose voice had barely finished changing, and couldn't use it to speak a word of Hebrew anyway, was being sent on the most dangerous, sensitive missions reserved for Israel's elite, serving as a mercenary. A mercenary! Each time we left we doubted we'd ever come back, and this CHILD joins up just for the paycheck!"  
"Ah, I think I see where this is going," Kaze said. "Given that I've SEEN Master Saotome in battle, I think it's safe to say that his skills were neither useless nor unimpressive."  
June snorted. "That man is a death machine, pure and simple. His personal kill count for magi, under my command alone, mind you, was eighteen. I haven't managed that many in my entire career so far. He's saved my life and numerous other commandos' dozens of times. He's completed entire missions by himself AND performed rescues during those missions, sometimes against orders!"  
Kaze nodded as the sorceress continued to fume. "Go on. I assume there's more to it."  
"Oh, there is," she grumbled. "If he was just some exemplary commando, it wouldn't have been so bad, but Saotome is just... just so damn..."  
"Informal? Passionate? Unprofessional? Heroic?" Kaze guessed.  
"Yes," June mumbled. "He thinks nothing of protocol, he doesn't care about the objective beyond his getting paid for it, he doesn't take his job seriously, he's always showing off, he always treats the lives of his comrades as being more important than the mission or any orders that might complicate him saving/protecting them, and he's just so damn GOOD at it!" She nuzzled herself into the crook of Kaze's neck. "But what am I supposed to complain about? That he's so much better than me? That he thinks the lives of his friends are more important than the objective? That he won't even consider conflicts of authority when someone he cares about is in danger? That he's rude and disrespectful while he's in the process of saving countless lives and ensuring absolute victory for us?"  
The evon cleric said nothing, merely holding the silver-haired woman closely.  
Eventually, she sighed. "So that's what it all boils down to. Jealousy and bitterness. Well, that, and his attitude DOES grate on me. Back then, I envied his power, which was why I was in such a rush to become a magi soldier. Of course, once the process had been completed and tested, Ranma was gone and the only benchmarks I had to compare myself to were the other cyborgs. And now he's back, and better than ever." She sighed again. "And he looks so damn happy. He's free to do whatever he wants. He has intimate companionship flocking to him, even here. He has close and powerful friends that apparently follow him just because they want to, without obligation from a military hierarchy or even a regular paycheck. After all my hard work and rank and entitlements and gains, I envy a seventeen year-old boy who spends his life slogging from mudhole to shoddy mudhole looking for cheap work in order to eat."  
"And that pisses you off far more than Master Saotome himself," Kaze theorized.  
"You got it, clown," despite still using the slur for evon, there was no malevolence or coldness in her voice. In fact, she sounded... relieved.  
"Well, in all fairness, he's not all THAT happy," the cleric reasoned. "He IS being hunted down by dragons, you know. And as for his friends, I can guarantee that we're all far more trouble than we're worth."  
June considered this. "Hmmmm... you know, that makes me feel a little better."  
Kaze chuckled lightly. "Well, that does it for backstory exposition. Want to go back to your quarters?"  
The silver-haired woman sat up straight and slid off her stool. "I thought you'd never ask. This way."

Emrey, who had snuck into a booth nearby to eavesdrop on the conversation, scowled mightily. Not only because he had just wasted twenty minutes to watch the cornerstone of his plan run off to get laid, but also because he hadn't known that the general was so vulnerable to having someone spew sympathetic nonsense to her.  
'What a tired old speech, too! The 'there's a woman deep inside who wants to be loved' monologue is so cliche! If I'd known that's all it took to get her out of uniform, I would've nailed her long ago!' the rakshasa thought. Not that he was really brave enough to put the moves on a woman as powerful and merciless as General Kitinski, but it was grating to see the scrawny cleric perform a feat of empathy and seduction he could manage with ease.  
'Well, that was a dry well. I suppose it's on to plan B, then. Or is it C now? Well, whatever.'

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Garron sniffed the air tenderly as the skimmer piled the vulture wreck into its bays, standing apart from the other soldiers.  
Besides being a sniper and a ranger, both skill sets that were primarily used while separated from other unit members, the werewolf knew that he usually made the normal men uncomfortable, which is why he was rarely given guard detail. That the officer in charge decided to take him along was entirely due to his skills in detecting enemies and skill at forestry, since there were still supposed to be some enemies lurking around in the forest.  
So while the normal soldiers milled around the skimmer with their eyes glued to the treeline, he was perched on one of the sturdier branches, sniffing the air.  
'Something's... not right here. Hmmm...' Frowning, he jumped down and began to walk back to the skimmer, seeing that it had completed loading the wreckage.  
_Sniff! Sniff!_  
Garron stopped, and his ears twitched.  
Then he slowly leaned down, and placed his hand on the ground, staying absolutely still.  
His ears fell back against his head. "Oh, no..." Dropping any pretense of stealth, he dashed out of the forest and toward the skimmer, moving so fast that many of the IEF soldiers standing guard almost shot him in their surprise.  
"Move the transport!" He shouted, waving his clawed hand at the men up top. "Something's coming! Get out of here!!"  
Everyone knew he was the ranger for a reason, and the soldiers immediately began clambering up into the skimmer despite their confusion. More than one man shouted out questions about what the problem was as they went, however.  
"A subterranean! An earth stalker or a wyrm! Or maybe even something bigger!" The werewolf shouted, making a mighty leap to grab onto the railing of the top of the transport skimmer before hoisting himself over the edge.

The skimmer, naturally, floated above the ground via anti-gravity fields as it turned around to head back to the Messiah. So when the ground began visibly trembling, the only soldiers to notice were those that were, for one reason or another, looking closely at the surrounding forest or the ground and noting that the grass and branches were shaking without any wind.  
It didn't matter for long, as the rumbling soon became audible, and the skimmer jerked to the side awkwardly as an armored head burst through the dirt and rock and scraped by the transport's side.  
Garron gulped as the head rose approximately thirty feet in the air, supported by a thick, powerfully armored neck, and then tilted over to stare balefully at the comparatively tiny creatures in the skimmer.  
"Ah. I see. It's something bigger," the werewolf mumbled quietly as his nearly overpowering natural instincts urged him to jump off the skimmer and flee, perhaps taking a moment to soil himself first. The soldier in him barely managed the discipline required to actually wait for an order, assuming that panic hadn't driven the wits right out of the commanders.  
It hadn't. "Release flare bombs!" One lieutenant shouted in a voice that Garron found surprisingly firm. Every once in a while, the humans did impress him.  
With only a split-second of hesitation, several soldiers armed with grenade launcher attachments switched out the fragmentation ammunition and loaded the light-based stun grenades before raising their rifles and firing in a symphony of harmless sounding _Pop!_ noises.  
The earth dragon, which had been trying to decide the best way in which to bite into the bulky, floating craft, was suddenly subjected to dozens of flare bursts all around its head. The fire damage was negligible to the massive beast, but it howled in fury as incredibly bright flashes of light totally blinded its darkness-attuned, light-sensitive eyes.  
Growling, the earth dragon reared its head back before driving itself forward, intending to smash the floating transport to pieces.  
It didn't work, and the frustrated creature found itself smashing into bare dirt. As its normal vibration-based senses detected nothing from the skimmers anti-gravity field, the ancient serpent slowly brought other, less common senses to bear that it rarely used.

This afforded the men on the skimmer precious moments to act, and as the hovercraft began to pick up speed and altitude, soldiers ran for the deck guns, turning the rail-mounted light autocannons on the confused beast.  
Garron winced as his sensitive hearing protested at the roar of the weapons, and he unslung his sniper rifle, unsure as he was whether it would be of any use in this situation; while his rounds would doubtlessly be able to penetrate dragon hide, he doubted such a relatively small, single projectile would do any real damage, even against relatively vulnerable targets such as eyes and the brain.  
_VWABOOM!_ Massive crystals burst up through the ground next to the skimmer, raking the sides and shattering as they scored dents and small tears in the transport's armor. The transport itself shook slightly, but otherwise remained steady as it continued to wind its way through the trees and upward to a higher altitude.  
Garron frowned as he watched the pattern of birds flying upward out of the trees, putting years of experience and discipline to use in ignoring the battle in which he could barely contribute (but which his life doubtlessly hinged upon) in order to search the surrounding area.  
He noted something was wrong immediately. Birds and even earthbound woodland creatures had difficulty fleeing from an earth dragon's approach, because it was nigh impossible for most of them to tell where the threat was approaching from, and birds didn't even notice until the creatures were right on top of (or more precisely, right under) them. Judging by the waves of avians taking low-level flight through the forest - not to mention the way they simply wound around their current position, rather than taking off away from it - indicated a larger incoming threat, and one far more visible than the beast currently hurling large-radius earth spells at the small transport.  
Knowing that he wasn't going to like what he was about to see, the sniper braced a clawed foot against the railing and fished for his binoculars.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The skimmer captain tried to keep from shaking as another razor-sharp crystal tower burst from the ground below, being barely avoided only because of the skimmer's speed and rolling gait over the surface. While the lieutenant barked insults and demands at the soldiers at the autocannon mounts, he was in charge of making desperate, awkward guesses as to the path that would keep them from getting killed until the massive dragon regained its vision (at which point they were all dead, as the dodging ability of the skimmer was not nearly enough to counter the massive beast otherwise).  
He was also in charge of radioing for help and warning the Messiah about the creature, but somehow those efforts had been stymied in advance.  
"What do you mean you can't get through? Is it a mechanical problem?" He growled, unnecessarily raising the pitch of his voice so that it edged out the report from the deck guns above.  
"I don't KNOW, sir!" The communications officer seethed. "It's nothing apparent, but all I'm getting is static!"  
Both mens' fragile nerves nearly broke when a furry, bestial form burst into the cockpit of the transport.  
"What in the bloody-"  
Garron cut the man off with a snap of his jaws. He didn't like using such a tactic, as it reinforced people's view of him as a mere monster, but now was frankly the perfect time to dispense with such concerns. "Listen to me! Stop gaining altitude immediately! As soon as you-"  
The werewolf was cut by a loud grinding noise, followed by the entire craft shaking.  
"M-Minor damage to the anti-gravity engines, Captain!" The damage technician said. "We're maintaining power!"  
This distraction apparently shook some of the captain's spine back into place, and he glared at the one-eyed lycanthrope. "Please explain to me, **Sergeant**, why I should put my crew and cargo at the mercy of that serpentine freak out there by maintaining an altitude too low to breach the surrounding forest wall keeping us in this area?"  
Garron twitched. Of COURSE no one was just going to make this easy and listen to him without questions. "How about at least a dozen approaching dragons, mostly fliers, who could snap us up out of the air or spit a fireball right on top of us without even slowing down?"  
The captain was silent for a few moments. "Okay... and how is staying here supposed to help us evade them?" He didn't know much about dragons, but he knew that they tended to have rather good vision. The hovercraft was bulky, had no camouflage or cloaks, and couldn't possibly fit into the forest to be protected by the forest canopy.  
"Because the dragons are clearly coordinating their approach on a single target; my guess is the Messiah itself," Garron explained, annoyed that he had to go into detail when they had so little time, but gratified that the man was now listening to him. "What we're going to do is make an intentionally rough landing on the edge of the forest and make it look like we've wrecked. The fliers won't bother with us, and if everybody stays still and quiet, the earth dragon won't either. Once they decide that we're no longer a threat, they'll have to hurry on to keep up with the attack, and the subterranean will bring his magnetic fields with him, allowing us to start up radio contact again and give warning."  
The captain swallowed, mulling the idea over but remaining skeptical. "How do you know they're not after us, or that they won't stop to finish us off once we've landed?"  
"More than a dozen serpent kings to kill off thirty humans in a floating metal dinghy? That's beyond overkill," the werewolf replied. "On the other hand, if they're attacking the Messiah, it's more along the lines of 'maybe just enough'. They can't afford to get separated if a direct assault is to succeed." Then he mumbled under his breath. "I'm just hoping they realize that."  
The captain chewed his lip, wincing as another screeching noise filled the cockpit from a crystal blast bombarding the skimmer armor. "Did you run this plan by the lieutenant?"  
"Yes, Captain," Garron said honestly.  
"And what'd he say?"  
The werewolf's ears drooped slightly. "He said to shut up and get my ugly tail into a firing position and shoot something... and then he kicked me." Garron mumbled, fighting the urge to whimper. He HATED being outmuscled by ordinary humans. It served as a constant reminder of just how weak and helpless he was without his guns.  
The captain of the vessel was silent for a few more moments until a distant roar came from overhead, being barely heard over the blaze of gunfire from the decks and the constant static from the communications relays.  
"You know, I never liked that guy anyway," the captain decided, turning toward the pilot. "Reduce speed by thirty percent and altitude by forty percent. Head toward that tree bank and cut power to the engines on my mark. Oh, and give the boys a warning to brace themselves."  
The man turned back to the surprised but visibly pleased werewolf as he found his seat and began to buckle up before bracing his legs against the railing. "Say, what if you're wrong about this and the damn lizards DO stop to kill us?"  
Garron sweatdropped. "Ah. Well..." He shrugged. "I'm a ranger and a werewolf, and this is a forest. So you can rest assured that I'll be forced to take full responsibility for the failure of my plan when I make it back to the sandship safely. And most likely alone."  
"Wonderful," the captain deadpanned. Then he turned toward the pilot. "Brace for impact! Cutting engine power in THREE! TWO! ONE! NOW!"

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Karen smiled broadly as she let Ranma into her room, not at all phased by the simple and unimpressive tunic he was wearing for the occasion (it was obvious that the wanderer had merely bathed and removed his armor and other equipment).  
It was equally obvious that the Israeli woman had put more thought into her wardrobe, wearing a slinky black gown with long slits up the sides, but Ranma found it hard to find the outfit especially enticing when it showed LESS skin than her normal uniform.  
As he sat down at the small table near the center of the room (though it seemed to be unusually close to the large, plain king-sized bed that dominated the relatively small space) somewhat nervously, he reflected on the most likely chain of events to take place here tonight.  
Karen had not been at all ambiguous about her intentions, and had in fact lightly threatened him if he were to try to avoid their "date" while they had been back on the transport. Despite her obvious willingness to give herself to him, Ranma wasn't nearly so enthusiastic about taking every possible opportunity to make out with the sorceress. Karen was a valuable friend, and despite her protests to the contrary, he knew she wanted more out of their relationship than a one-night stand every time he stopped by. And the simple fact was that he **could** give her that relationship. But he just didn't want to, and frankly felt like a heel for it.  
Of course, that was all **beside** the fact that he was trying, with great difficulty, to come up with a plan to infiltrate a demon lord's territory protected by several immortal, magical, and insanely powerful beasts. Eating dinner and rekindling old relationships, while great fun, were not his top priorities.  
"Tsk! Where ARE the cooks? They should have shown up by now," Karen clicked her tongue irritably.  
"Oh, uh..." Ranma chewed his lip for a moment. "Actually, I changed that around a bit. Rayden's gonna be making us something."  
Karen blinked in surprise as she sat down. "Your dark paladin cooks?" She asked dubiously. "I was under the distinct impression he was hardly bright enough to know which end of the sword goes into his enemies."  
Ranma couldn't help but chuckle. "Yeah, he DOES leave a pretty accurate first impression." Then he sobered slightly. "But through some bizarre combination of improbable experiences and personal trials, he apparently became a very good cook. And we picked up some cutlets on the way up here, so I figured he could make something special for us."  
Karen cocked her head to the side. "Something special? Like what?" The original menu had been pan-fried sea bass steaks, which were fairly special for a group that was perpetually traveling the interior regions of Asia, even if it was frozen.  
"What was it he called it? Dragon ribs dark-roasted over onions, I think," Ranma mumbled, scratching his head.  
"I'm going to point out the odd things about that recipe in the order in which they alarm me," the sorceress deadpanned. "Dragon ribs? We're eating dragon?"  
"Yeah. I was skeptical at first too, but that stuff is GREAT," the pigtailed man assured her.  
"Okay. You also said 'dark-roasted'? What the heck does that mean?"  
Ranma frowned. "I don't really know. I'm guessing he actually uses that black fire or lightning stuff to cook the meat."  
"You mean like that dark beam that blasted through an ice wall and blew a juga into so many itty-bitty chunks? Is that safe?"  
"Probably not," Ranma admitted, "but if Rayden's making it, I can pretty much guarantee it'll taste good, at least."  
Karen gave him a half-lidded stare as she leaned back in her chair. "Ranma, you know I'd trust you with my life, but that doesn't extend to everyone who you let tag along behind you. You're not the best judge of people."  
The pigtailed man shrugged. "Ray's a hard guy to judge. On the one hand, he's obviously evil and willfully follows a dark cult fully dedicated to unmotivated, hateful destruction and warfare. On the other hand, he doesn't like to fight and kill things that can't defend themselves because it's against his martial code. Hell, outside of combat, he's more rude than really evil. Besides, for whatever reason he's decided that he should do what I say, and he's proven pretty darn loyal so far."  
"So you're sure he's not cooking up something poisonous and explosive that will kill us when we eat it," Karen asserted.  
"Yes," Ranma said immediately. "Well, no. But I'm sure that if it does kill us, it will be an accident."  
"Fabulous," the sorceress mumbled. "So how'd you meet Rayden anyway?"  
"Ah, well, that's a bit of a story," Ranma mumbled. "It all began when I found this greater dryad in the forest..."

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The IEF lieutenant groaned weakly as he tried to get up from where he laid, sprawled against the railing he had slammed into. Most of his men were either clinging desperately to handholds while trying to get their hearts started again, while the others had been thrown from the transport.  
He grimaced as he patted the back of his head and then noted the blood that covered his glove. He probably had a concussion, but it couldn't have been that bad if he had retained consciousness and still maintained his senses.  
'I guess that damn dog talked the captain into his plan. It better work,' the officer thought ruefully. Getting a concussion and, from the look of his men, a few broken bones was preferable to being a dragon's meal, but getting wrecked and THEN becoming a dragon's meal was just unforgivable.  
He started to get up, but then froze as something hissed at him to stay down.  
Looking over, his eyes narrowed as he saw the werewolf sniper, looking somewhat beat-up himself, but still managing to stand easily enough as he pressed himself flat against the floor of the upper deck. Not that a little blunt trauma meant anything to a werewolf, even one as weak as the IEF ranger. Bruises and abrasions faded away under the lycanthrope's fur even as the lieutenant watched.  
"FSSSSSS..." The officer froze and quickly used hand signals to any of his men that may have been watching for commands to stay prone.  
Hissing dangerously, a wingless venom dragon slid its serpentine body around the transport, not bothering to attack the damaged skimmer. In another situation she might have stopped for a snack, but to attack the vehicle would probably provoke a counter-attack from the survivors, and she didn't have time to finish off the feeble creatures if she wanted to make the assault at the same time as her winged brethren.  
The lieutenant looked appropriately amazed as the long, serpentine beast slipped around the transport wreckage, not even stopping to snatch up one of the bodies that had been flung entirely from the skimmer. "Well I'll be damned. They really are in a hurry"  
A feral roar came from above, and human and werewolf below winced.  
"Dunno what they bothered attackin' us for," a soldier mumbled as he disentangled himself from the railing. "Not like they'll get the element of surprise flying at that altitude and screaming the whole way."  
"The difference between the Messiah's radar range and our position is probably a good eight, maybe ten minutes. More if the fliers are deliberately slowing themselves for the wingless dragons," Garron explained. "The IEF can make considerable preparations in ten minutes. And against serpent kings, we'll need them."  
"Lieutenant!" Garron and the officer in question turned as one of the crewman emerged from the cockpit, a bit of blood on his arm but otherwise looking unscathed. "We have some good news, and we've got some bad news."  
"I'm going to accept that as a positive development, seeing how the news has been all bad up to this point," the officer said. "Well? Get to it!"  
"Sir! The good news is that the interference preventing us from contacting the Messiah is gone! If Sergeant Garron was correct in that it was a magnetic field originating from the earth dragon, that means the dragon is gone too!"  
The lieutenant nodded. "That IS good news. And now for the letdown."  
"Er, right. While the interference is gone, the communications array was damaged in the crash, so we still can't contact the sandship."  
"Of course, this IS the IEF's pride and joy we're talking about; the absolute pinnacle of magitechnology!" Garron said, bigsweating as he pretended he hadn't heard the crewman. "I'm sure the Messiah can hold out just fine against a few overgrown lizards."  
Once he returned his gaze to the others, he saw that all the soldiers were glaring at him. "What? At least we're safe now, right?"  
"Shut up and secure the area, ranger!" The lieutenant growled, slowly standing up. "And anybody who knows a spark plug from a socket wrench, take a look at that array! I want that thing back up and running in five minutes, tops! Move it, people!"

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"I feel a great disturbance in the force..." K mumbled from atop Rayden's head.  
The demon knight stopped, his hands still resting on the gurney laden with the fruits of his labors. "What's that supposed to mean? Is it one of your weird dragon senses?"  
"No, not this time," K said, looking distracted. "I feel... I feel as if..." he closed his eyes for a moment, then snapped them back open. "As if someone I know is getting laid!"  
Rayden sweatdropped. "Who cares?"  
"Someone planning to stop by and meet with a close friend of his might care," the metadragon said, grinning. "C'mon, let's go!"  
"Whoa. Hey. Wait a minute," Rayden mumbled, not budging. "When you put it that way, maybe we should come back later."  
"Later? Get real! We might never have another chance to see Colonel Cold naked!" K said happily.  
"I'm perfectly comfortable with that," the Dread Knight said.  
K rolled his eyes. "What's with you, anyway? You can't tell me you don't want to see what little that uniform of hers covered up!"  
"Actually, that's pretty much what I just told you," Rayden said, apparently firm in his resolve. "I can wait. Just use your stupid pervert senses or whatever and tell me when they're done."  
K twitched, and cursed himself for his small form and inability to change into human form. Putting aside the fact that Ranma amd Karen might be at it for hours otherwise, he couldn't walk in on them without Rayden's help because he couldn't manipulate doorknobs as a dragon.  
"What are you, gay?" The metadragon tried, hoping to prod Rayden into going along with it.  
"No," the Dread Knight answered without further comment.  
'Well, crap,' K thought. 'This loser's even deader in the pants than Ranma.' Not that Ranma was actually dead in the pants, as Natalie had happily attested to back at the Ninja camp, but what were the chances of two out his three teammates having such powerful inhibitions?  
'Wait a minute. I'm thinking about this too hard. This is Rayden we're talking about.' Clearing his throat, the metadragon spoke again. "You know, now that I've had some time to mull it over, I think it's Kaze who's getting some, not Ranma."  
The demon knight blinked. "Oh. Really?"  
"Sure. Now hurry up and get in there before the food gets cold!" K prodded. 'Victory is mine!'

Suffice to say, as soon as Rayden opened the door to Karen's quarters and rolled the gurney in (without knocking, of course), K leapt from his head and quickly flew to a corner of the room so that he wouldn't get hit by any of the fire and ice bolts that might be flung at the dark paladin, and to get a veiw that wouldn't be obscured by those same projectiles.  
He was severely disappointed when, to his surprise, Ranma and Karen were seated, inactive, and clothed. Not only that, but NO ONE threw an energy bolt at Rayden. What a waste of time!  
"Dinner's here!" Rayden called without enthusiasm or ceremony as he rolled the gurney up.  
Karen frowned as she looked over the food. "You could have knocked, you know..."  
"Yeah, I guess I could have," the demon knight replied, dismissing the woman. "Anyway, we've got dragon ribs, steak, and some spinach and potatoes for side dishes." As he named each dish, he pulled off the metal bell lid covering it.  
Karen looked appropriately surprised that everything looked and smelled quite good. "Wow. I guess you really can cook."  
The demon knight glared at her. "If you can freeze things solid by yelling and pointing at them, I think I can handle sprinkling spices on chunks of meat and putting them over a heat source."  
"Okay, okay! I didn't mean to offend," Karen said defensively. 'Just what is his problem?'  
Ranma looked annoyed at Rayden's rudeness, but at the same time he fully expected it, so he said nothing. "It looks good, Ray."  
"Good," the demon knight said simply as he finished putting the serving plates on the relatively small table. "So... should I come back later to pick up the dishes, or are you two going to be making out then?"  
Ranma blanched, and Karen flushed.  
"We'll take care of the dishes, **thank you**!" The sorceress said sharply. "You can leave now."  
"With pleasure," Rayden mumbled as he turned around and left.  
K glanced between the retreating dark paladin and the seated couple, trying to decide whether he should follow Rayden as he had been doing, or make lecherous cracks at Ranma until he got thrown out.  
"I was talking to you, too," Karen deadpanned after noticing that the metadragon hadn't moved to leave immediately. K yelped and promptly did so.

Once the door closed, Ranma sighed. "I'm sorry about that. Like I said, Ray's pretty much an asshole to anyone who he doesn't immediately like. I'd say something about it, but... well, it's just hard to hold that against him what with the whole 'Dread Knight' thing, you know?"  
Karen nodded reluctantly. "Low expectations. I understand. I have the same issues with Emrey."  
"The rakshasa assassin?" Ranma stopped for a moment to fit what he knew about the demon into the context of his problem with Rayden. "So he has some annoying habits, but you're just happy as long as he's not stabbing people that bug him?"  
The sorceress chuckled. "Got it in one! The man is CONSTANTLY tomcatting around the ship and any towns we stop in while on leave. If a woman who catches his eye is married or in a committed relationship, then he'll even take on the form of her lover in order to get into her pants." She frowned deeply as she served herself a steak. "He even tried that on me once. It took hours for Teema to break him out of that ice block." Then she shrugged. "But frankly, as long as he manages to keep himself from going on a killing spree every time a guy manages to pry him off of his girlfriend, I really can't expect much more of him."  
Shaking her head at the foolishness of her subordinate, Karen finally steeled herself and put a forkful of steak into her mouth.  
"... Wow. This really IS good," the colonel murmured, obviously impressed.  
"Toldja." Ranma smirked as he grabbed a slice of rib meat. Of course, as the dragon's ribs were thicker than most lamp posts, there were no actual bones in the dish, but apparently Rayden cut up dragons just as a butcher would a cow. "Ray can actually be pretty useful as long as he has someone to tell him what to do."  
Karen nodded reluctantly. "Should I be worried that tiny runes of power glowing with evil energy are inscribed on the edge of the steaks?"  
Ranma stopped, took a moment to find the phenomenon on his own meat, and then cut off a section and ate it.  
"Doesn't bother me."  
The ponytailed girl rolled her eyes. "Okay, okay."

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

K glanced around the hallway, obviously discontent. 'Damn. If Ranma isn't getting any yet, maybe I WAS getting that feeling from Kaze. For all the good that does me.' He didn't know where Kaze might be, or who might have attracted his attention.  
He gave up on the idea and shifted his focus to other concerns. Kaze wasn't nearly as fun to tease anyway because the priest was so straightforward and shameless about his lecherous ways.  
"Seriously man, what was your problem back there?" K asked, flying up onto Rayden's shoulder. "She didn't do anything to you, did she?"  
Rayden snorted. "Besides dragging us onto this boring hulk when we SHOULD be slogging through the wastes and fighting epic battles and whatnot, no. Women just annoy me, that's all."  
K frowned. He had long been under the impression that demons of any ethical persuasion were lecherous in general, and absolutely lust-crazed in the few cases that stood out. "Why?"  
"They're weak, feeble creatures that just get in the way and distract men from their duties," the Dread Knight spat hatefully as he started wheeling the cart away down the hall. "They can't fight, and they're constantly complaining. If it wasn't for the whole pregnancy thing, I'd say the realms would be better off without them."  
"They can't fight? Didn't a woman just kick your ass a couple hours ago?" the metadragon deadpanned.  
"Well, yeah. She's an exception. And she's not bad. You know, for a girl," Rayden said.  
K rolled his eyes. "You know Karen can fight too, don't you?"  
"Meh. I'll believe it when I see it. She was just floating in the air watching when I saw her."  
The discussion of Karen's skills would have continued further, but both dragon and demon fell silent when a squad of soldiers rounded the hall corner and jogged up to them, rifles at the ready.  
The leader of the group sighted him and raised his weapon. "You there! We received a complaint about someone harrassing Colonel Molsk in her quarters!"  
Rayden blinked. "Whoa. That was fast." He scratched his head, wondering when the sorceress had put in the order to have him forcibly removed. 'Must've been after I had already left. Impressive response time. Though she didn't have to get us thrown out.'  
"Hey, whoa, it's cool," K said gently, trying to keep Rayden out of yet another conflict. "We were just leaving. Right?"  
The dark paladin shrugged, not really caring.  
The sergeant lowered his weapon, and gestured for his men to do the same. "Good. Why don't we escort you to another part of the ship? Corporal, check on the Colonel."

Down the hallway and around the corner, Emrey banged his head repeatedly against the wall in frustration. Though Ranma and Karen may be interrupted by a single man asking if things were all right, it didn't have quite the mood-shattering impact of a dozen armed men kicking down a door. 'Damnation! I should have provided a better description than "muscular fellow with black hair"!'  
Stopping for a moment to massage his bruising forehead, he considered his options. "Well, there goes plan... I think it was D or E. Now what?"

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"No, I'm fine, thank you," Karen said to the man at the door, vaguely puzzled.  
"Good. We'll take care of the problem," the corporal said stiffly, trying his absolute best not to let his eyes dip below his superior's chin. 'DAMN that's a nice dress...' "Enjoy your meal. Please call us if you need anything else."  
"Uh, sure..." the sorceress said uncertainly, having no idea what the "problem" was, only that security had been alerted to it and taken care of it. "Dismissed, Corporal."  
"Ma'am!" Nodding briefly (and taking the opportunity to finally ogle her body), the guard exited the room, deeply envying the pigtailed fellow still seated at the table within.

"What was that all about?" Ranma mumbled as he paused in his meal.  
Karen shrugged as she seated herself. "I don't really know. I guess there was some joker in the hall causing trouble."  
Ranma's face darkened immediately. "Rayden..."  
"Probably," the sorceress admitted. "But apparently he's not picking any fights with security, so they're going to drop him off at the lounge instead of the brig. He'll be fine."  
Ranma was really more worried about Rayden killing a good number of soldiers and blowing a hole in the Messiah than he was about the Dread Knight's personal welfare, but accepted that everything would be fine as he went back to eating.  
As one would expect, the pigtailed wanderer finished eating his third helping just as Karen finished her first, long used to stuffing himself as quickly as possible while on the road (the unspoken rule was that extra helpings around the campfire were "first come, first serve," and Rayden was a vicious diner).  
Rubbing his feet together uncomfortably, Ranma finally broke the silence just as Karen was reaching for another potato.  
"So, Karen... have you... uh... dated much these past few years?" Ranma began, cursing internally when the woman froze up. 'One of these days I have to get a rank in diplomacy. Seriously, this is weak.'  
Karen frowned for a moment, mulling the question over. Eventually, she decided to dispense with the subtle banter (Ranma sucked at that anyway) and cut to the heart of the matter. "Why would you ask me that?"  
"Uhm... I'm just... trying to catch up with you?" He tried lamely.  
"Don't give me that," the sorceress deadpanned. "If you don't want to tell me, fine. No, I'm not currently attached."  
Ranma briefly wondered at the fact that she had answered a different question from the one he had asked, but plowed ahead regardless. "Really? Why not?"  
Karen's frown became more uncertain. "What do you mean?"  
"Well, come on, you're a pretty good catch," Ranma said bluntly. "You're smart, beautiful, powerful, and I imagine you're pretty wealthy too. I'd think that you'd have guys lining up to be your husband."  
THAT set off a few alarms in Karen's head. 'Now it's not just dating, but marriage?' His glowing endorsement of her aside, she was worried about where this was going. "Well, I spend nearly all my time on the battlefield, since I waived the normal tour of duty rotation. I don't have much time to meet men outside of the military, and dating within it is against regulations." She didn't bring up the fact that despite the regulations, many of her subordinates tried their luck anyway. And she CERTAINLY wasn't about to mention the precious few times that she gave in to temptation and accepted their advances. "Ranma, seriously, why are you asking me this?"  
Ranma sighed. "Look, Karen, I know our relationship is kind of... unclear. At least, it is to me. I don't really know where we stand with each other or what you expect from me."  
'Ah, there we go. Bluntness,' Karen thought as she mulled over Ranma's statement. She decided an equally blunt response was warranted. "Ranma, do you want to have sex with me?"  
Ranma had been holding onto his water glass the whole time to keep from fiddling with his hands; a decision that had seemed smart and tactful before his grip around the glass tightened, instantly shattering it and grinding it into so many little shards.  
The pain was negligible, and Karen had been expecting a shocked reaction, so crushing the glass didn't even provide a momentary distraction from the current turn of events. "Uhm... w-well..." Ranma's pigtail was standing on end as he searched for something appropriate to say that wouldn't seem shallow or offend the woman across from him. "There's no easy way to answer that question," he finally said nervously.  
"Translation: Yes, but..." Karen prompted, leaning back as she crossed her arms under her breasts.  
"But... uh... I'm not sure it's a good idea," he said, slightly subdued by how she was taking control of the conversation.  
"Well, I think it IS a good idea," Karen said stubbornly. She might have found the conversation odd normally, but she knew Ranma very well. He never took advantage of a girl; though if the girl was determined, she might take advantage of him. She was QUITE determined.  
The pigtailed man sighed again, rubbing his head. "Karen... you mean a lot to me. More than just a girlfriend. Especially one who I hardly ever see." He frowned, obviously frustrated in trying to express himself. "You deserve someone for yourself, who'll stick by you all the time and settle down with you. I can't do that for you. I just stop by when I need work or need a favor, and then I'm off to the next battlefield."  
The sorceress was silent for several moments. "Maybe you're right. But what about you? Don't you deserve to have someone? At least for one night?" She asked neutrally, her expression betraying nothing.  
Ranma just BARELY stopped himself before he said "I could have anyone I want" or "I have someone in damn near every town I visit." There were limits to even his social ineptitude. Instead he struggled for a few more seconds, and then said, "I guess. I'll figure that out on my own. But you're too important to me for me to risk hurting you. You're a great friend, and I feel like a total jerk just showing up and then leaving you whenever it's convenient. Maybe it would be better if we just stayed friends, you know?"  
Again, Karen remained silent for a few moments. Then she sighed and stood up. "I can see where you're coming from," she admitted as she walked over to him and placed a hand on his shoulder. "Honestly, the idea had crossed my mind as well." Then she pursed her lips. "Still..."  
Then she yanked him out of his chair and pulled him into a passionate embrace, kissing him deeply.  
Ranma was surprised enough that he didn't catch his footing fully as he was pulled toward her lips, and he didn't provide any resistance as Karen suddenly pushed him away and onto her bed.  
"You know, it would be a lot easier not to seduce you if you didn't always care so damn much. It's a real turn-on," the sorceress said almost conversationally as she slipped the straps of her gown off her shoulders.  
'Man, things ALWAYS end up like this. Why do I even fight it?' Resigning himself to his admittedly pleasurable fate, he started to take off his shirt.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"I'm telling you, we need to be on full alert!" Emrey protested hotly to the man in front of him, fuming at the individual's stubbornness.  
This particular individual was Jacob Yakowski, Captain of the Sandship Epsilon. And he was currently fighting off a headache as he tried to wave off the rakshasa. "I told you that I'd take your report under advisement," he said gruffly. "The turrets will be manned, and I've already sent the order to have fighters and hovercraft prepared for a defensive engagement. But I cannot justify putting the entire ship on full alert because of a single, random unconfirmed report of an incoming enemy force." 'Especially one from a demon,' he added mentally, narrowing his eyes.  
Emrey winced. "I, uh, I didn't say it was necessarily INCOMING... but it's definitely out there!"  
The captain snorted. "All the more reason not to fly off the handle. Besides, what were you doing routine scouting outside of radar range in the first place? Aren't you a commando?"  
"Assassin, technically," the rakshasa said shamelessly, not bothering to use the euphemism for his area of specialization. "And I was just searching the area to look for remnants of the force we broke in the recent operation. How was I supposed to know there were so many survivors?"  
"Fine. So why're you taking this to me, instead of your CO or General Kitinski?" Captain Yakowski asked suspiciously.  
Emrey twitched. "They were... occupied," he mumbled. Of course, June Kitinski and possibly Karen Molsk were both heartily engaged in lewd activities that he sorely wished to be involved in, and any interruption would most likely end with his untimely death by magical bombardment. Of course, there were other officers on board with equal authority, but he had a somewhat tarnished reputation among the upper ranks due to several indiscretions concerning a Colonel's wife and another one's youngest daughter. They might not be nearly so willing to put up with him as the captain of the ship.  
"Bah, whatever," the captain said, waving the demon away. "Now if you'll excuse me Lieutenant, I must-"  
"CAPTAIN!" A communications officer yelled as he barged into the strategy room, looking pale. "We just received contact from the transport skimmer! They encountered an enemy force en route to our location!"  
The captain blinked, obviously surprised. Emrey simply nodded somberly, expertly masking his utter shock.  
"How come they haven't contacted us until now?" the captain asked uneasily, wondering how Emrey found the enemy and got back to the Messiah before the transport had sent word.  
"The transport crashed and wrecked their comm array," the man said, still shaking slightly.  
'Whatever god may or may not be responsible for this: THANK YOU! Thank you thank you thank you!' Emrey said, a tear sliding down his cheek as his plan meshed beautifully with sheer coincidence.  
"Captain," the communications officer said shakily, "the enemy force is a group of dragons. At least fifteen strong, by their count."  
'A slight revision,' Emrey thought as several more tears streamed down his cheeks. 'I hate you, God.' Finding out that his fake warning coincided with a real attack was rather satisfying, but he'd much rather let the object of his lust screw the brains out of her old boyfriend than fight a single dragon, never mind a whole flight of them.  
"Dragons? Why didn't you tell me they were dragons?" The captain snapped at the rakshasa before turning back to the communications officer. "Reel in the hovercraft and move the artillery and combat mechs out to a position in the hills! Prepare all fighters and precision bombers!" Then he turned toward the door. "COMMANDER!!"  
The sound of running could soon be heard, and another officer stumbled into the strategy room, nearly tripping as he tried to slow himself. "C-Captain?"  
"Put the Messiah on full alert! Arm all weapons and feed auxiliary power to the shields! Expect radar contacts from the southwest!"  
"Yes, Captain!" The commander saluted hastily and dashed off toward the bridge.  
Captain Jacob Yakowski turned toward Emrey and wet his lips as he grasped for something to say. "It... appears I misjudged you," he finally admitted, "and I apologize. Sometimes it's easy to forget that no matter your species or reputation, you're a part of the IEF nonetheless."  
"Ah. Right. No harm done, I suppose," the rakshasa said vacantly. 'Damn! What did that speeder pilot look like again? Maybe if I take his form and tell the hangar chief that I'm on a rescue mission for the skimmer I can get out of here...'  
"Your warning may save hundreds, perhaps even thousands of lives today," Captain Yakowski said as he took the lieutenant by the shoulder and pulled him toward the bridge. "I'll make sure to put in a good word with your superior after the battle."  
'Huh. On second thought, what if they survive? Maybe I should wait around the hangar to see how the battle goes before leaving.'  
"Now if you'll excuse me Lieutenant, I have to get back to the bridge," the captain said as he let the rakshasa go. "You'll be in charge of defending the shield generator from boarding actions. I'll send word to the men to expect you."  
'I hate my life,' Emrey thought, silent tears streaming down his cheeks. 'But I still don't want it to end so soon!'

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

_ALERT! ALERT! ALL HANDS TO BATTLESTATIONS! THIS IS NOT A DRILL! REPEAT: THIS IS NOT A DRILL!_

June glanced up at the loudspeaker lazily, then slowly sat up, allowing the sheets to slide down off her body.  
Kaze didn't bother to look at the speaker, instead openly admiring the general's exposed, golden body with his arms resting under his head. "That sounds important."  
"It probably is," the sorceress said, crouching down to collect her clothing. "It's just as well. I was never that fond of cuddling."  
Kaze sweatdropped as he watched the general dress herself. 'Just as well that we're being attacked?' "You're an odd woman, you know that?"  
"And you're a terrible excuse for a priest," June said, smirking as she pulled her leotard uniform up.

_ALL HANDS, REPORT TO BATTLESTATIONS! THIS IS A CODE RED! INCOMING ENEMY FORCE CONSISTS OF OMEGA CLASS WARBEASTS! THIS IS NOT A DRILL!_

June frowned, then turned to her recent lover. "That's unfortunate. We could likely use some help for this."  
"What's an 'omega class warbeast'?" Kaze asked dubiously, quite wary of promising his help in warding off a foe that challenged a small army and massive mobile fortress.  
"It's a code for gargantuan creatures such as reaper queens, wyrms..." she raised an eyebrow. "And dragons. Hmm..."  
Kaze sighed. "I'll pass, thanks. I'm no good against dragons."  
"Hmph. Coward," June spat as she finished with her boots and reached for her cape.  
"You took me to your room because I'm an empathetic and persuasive speaker, not because I'll stupidly challenge creatures way beyond my level," the cleric reminded her. "If you want a brave man, I wouldn't be **too** heartbroken to set you up with my companions."  
The general rolled her eyes. "I'll pass, thank you. You should get some rest, then. You were quite energetic."  
"I doubt I will with all this racket," Kaze mumbled. "But nonetheless, good luck. If you see my friends out there helping to defend your ship, please don't 'accidentally' vaporize them."  
"No promises," June said jokingly, smiling slightly. "See you in a bit, clown."

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Karen clenched her teeth in frustration, and her hands gripped the sheets under her tightly as her entire body began to glow a bright, frosty blue.  
_ALERT! ALERT! ALL HANDS TO BATTLESTATIONS! THIS IS NOT A DRILL! REPEAT: THIS IS NOT A DRILL!_  
"Uh, Karen? You're getting kind of cold," Ranma said gently as the naked woman straddling him trembled in barely-restrained fury. Her rage, far from creating a hot aura, fed through her magical aura and immediately began sapping the heat from the surrounding area... including the unfortunate body pinned underneath her.  
The IEF colonel took several deep breaths, forcing her magic to subside. "It's... It's okay," she mumbled. "We can... continue this later. It would seem we're under attack."  
Ranma nodded somberly, sliding out from under her. "I gotcha. I'll do what I can."  
"You don't need to bother," Karen said absently as she slid her legs over so that they dangled over the edge of the bed. "We've got a full army and dozens of defensive weapons and measures. Whatever's attacking, we'll take care of it in no time."  
Ranma frowned. "Well... even so, I want to help. If I can save even one soldier's life, then it's better than just lying here."  
Karen stared at him from the edge of the bed for a long moment. Then she grabbed him by the shoulders and forced him down onto his back again, kissing him deeply.  
Ranma was receptive despite his surprise, but when she broke the kiss he looked confused. "K-Karen? What about-"  
"I'm sure they'll be fine without me," Karen said between pants as she pressed her body against his, moaning lightly at the warmth that encompassed her from the contact. "Like I said, the enemy will be no problem. What kind of force could possibly challenge us?"  
_ALL HANDS, REPORT TO BATTLESTATIONS! THIS IS A CODE RED! INCOMING ENEMY FORCE CONSISTS OF OMEGA CLASS WARBEASTS! THIS IS NOT A DRILL!_  
Ranma yelped as Karen's aura returned full force, and her eyes briefly flashed a pale blue.  
"SON OF A BITCH!" She screamed, punching the mattress next to Ranma's head.  
_KA-SSSHNK!_  
Karen blinked repeatedly as she felt some of her frustration evaporate from the release of energy, and then she flushed as she realized that she had just sealed her bed in a thin layer of ice... and Ranma as well. "Oops! Sorry!"  
Ranma groaned as he powered up his fire aura to melt the ice around him. 'Why me?'

End Chapter 12


	13. Conflict Draconis

The Dreadnaught: Ancient Relics or Modern Warcraft?

The humans continue to fascinate me. With all their advancements in the field of warfare, still they plow ahead, seeking ever more powerful weapons. This comes as no great surprise, as warfare is now a far more common occurrence in the east now that they have something to fight other than each other.+

The latest tactical challenge they face, evidently, is the construction of stronger mobile forces. As their strategic situation has changed, humans find it easier to hold strategic positions on a battlefield at the same time they find it more difficult to defend temporary bases, given that most demon warrior breeds fight with a hunter's mentality, and greatly prefer immobile, distracted targets rather than long convoys; most beasts will gladly assault a well-defended base camp before they'll attack a vulnerable and unsuspecting convoy on the move. Creatures frequently assault these camps looking for prey, not understanding that they have virtually no chance of success. As the paradigm of warfare shifts, the humans have adapted. Soldiers more and more often take to eating and sleeping in or on armored vehicles rather than setting up camp.+

These developments have led to some reconsideration of the basic structure of most land-based armies; naval forces eat, sleep, and live inside their war machines themselves, and can function indefinitely without stopping so long as they are regularly supplied. Of course, this state of affairs is a necessity on the open ocean, but it has certain benefits that soldiers on land could learn to appreciate.+

The problem with any overly large vehicle, as the humans understand it, is that it's extremely vulnerable to artillery fire and air strikes, which are ineffective against most small, mobile units. Demonic armies tend to possess feeble and short-ranged artillery - rarely amounting to anything stronger than a ballistae - and flying units rarely if ever possess the same kind of destructive power as even a relatively small payload of conventional bombs, as well as being likewise limited by a relatively short range. Furthermore, new advancements in magitechnology have introduced energy shields, providing near-impenetrable protection from long-range threats.+

Considering the prevalence of raiders in the wastes that gleefully prey on any military supply convoys they can take by surprise, military manufacturers started looking into the design and production of larger vehicles that could hopefully fully house and sustain its crew for a period of several weeks.+

There were few major breakthroughs in this area until the creation of the Messiah. The shell of the massive hovercraft was unearthed from the Dead Sea by Israeli archeological groups after doing an extensive search with newly developed geo-scanners that specifically searched for magical items buried deep underground. The projects that spawned this expedition are very complex in nature and motivations; I have discussed them at length in previous journals, so there's no need to delve too deeply here. While my research on the Messiah has been limited by extremely heavy security and my own reluctance to seize certain assets by force, I've managed to generate several likely theories surrounding the weapon.+

The massive carrier hovercraft that currently roams the wastes was built from what the scientists are referring to as a "dreadnaught," a massive craft that was buried underground with a sizeable cache of ancient magitechnology. This is fascinating for numerous reasons, foremost among those being that the humans of Earth realm were the first to develop effective magitechnology, or so it was thought. I've managed to observe enough of the artifacts to feel assured that these devices are not elven or angelic in origin, the only other races to combine magic with technology to any crude degree, so then what creatures created these behemoths?+

Of course, whenever there's a big mystery that involves powerful relics from a long-dead race, a scholar like myself is inclined to simply shrug and chalk it all up the Ancients, and the civilizations that existed eons ago as those god-like beings razed the stars. But that assumption makes little sense; the Ancients were beings of magic who twisted the forces of nature (which are, naturally, the forces that technology relies upon) at their whim. Their magic was of a kind held above all other forces of the universe. Why then, would they or any of their progeny stoop to these mortal machinations when a power far greater than that of the material universe protects you and wages your wars? There was another force at work during those turbulent times, I am sure of it.+

Nonetheless, my observation of the Messiah is continually stymied, and I doubt I'll have much more success studying the dreadnaught that the Americans recently unburied in Mexico. I may leave this mystery to the human scientists, for once.+

- Entry #4603 of Doppler Thaeramon's personal scientific journal

Nexus II  
by Black Dragon  
Damn near everything belongs to me 'cept Ranma.

Words in " " are presented phonetically, or is the primary language in a scene (usually English, in this case). " " is spoken in a different language than the norm. Sounds are italicized, and writing is now presented in +.

Chapter 13  
Conflict Draconis

_All hands to battle stations! All hands to battle stations! _

General Kitinski yawned as she walked down the hall to the Messiah's war room, where her officers were doubtlessly already making plans, ignoring the men and women dashing by her in a panic.

"Mmmm... I'm feeling a bit tired. The priest certainly was energetic..." she frowned suddenly and tilted her head up to look at the ceiling. "Wait, what was his name again?"

June was slightly perturbed when she realized that she really could not recall. The only times she had addressed him, she had referred to him as "evon," or the less polite term, "clown." It didn't sit well with her at all that she had slept with someone who she couldn't even name; she didn't consider herself as being "easy," and didn't want anybody else to have the same perception.

'Then again, ignoring what other people might think of me was part of the point of that little-' Her train of thought was interrupted as someone bumped her shoulder, and her eyes immediately snapped onto the culprit, the rest of her body stopping dead.

The man who had winged her glanced over his shoulder as he dashed away, looking prepared to deliver an annoyed reprimand.

Once he saw who he had just passed, his face paled considerably, and he halted in his tracks before whirling around.

"G-G-General Kitinski! I-I'm so s-sorry, Ma'am! I was careless, and-"

"At ease, soldier," she snapped in a manner that somehow seemed reprimanding and encouraging at the same time. "It was my fault; this is no time to be wandering through the halls daydreaming. On your way."

The soldier didn't take the time to reflect upon his good fortune, and quickly went back to dashing toward wherever he was going. June shook her head to clear it, her jaw setting firmly.

'Dammit June, put your nonchalance and self-assurance away for once! My soldiers need me...'

Taking a deep breath, her features softened, and she opened the door to her war room.

It was obvious that a great amount of strategizing and tactical discourse had been going on, despite the way that all her officers were silent and grim-faced when she entered, as if they had been waiting for her. The table between them projected a holographic display of the Messiah as well as the surrounding area in a one hundred mile radius, with several red arrows representing the expected angle of approach.

There were several other points on the hologram - they represented the placement of friendly forces - that had been highlighted hastily, probably over the discussion of troop placement, and one of the officers had apparently knocked over his coffee and was distracted enough that he'd thus far failed to clean it up. All indications of a spirited strategy meeting.

"All right people, I'm here. Give me the problem," she said firmly, stepping before the hologram and staring down at it intently.

A field major straightened. "General Kitinski, we have an incoming flight of Omegas from the southwest, heading on an attack vector to the Messiah. Satellite images have confirmed that the enemy units are all dragons of various types. As you know, creatures of such high mana resonance generate energy fields that disrupt long-range radar, so we won't have a bead on them weapons-wise until we have visual contact."

"How many?"

"A dozen flyers, and three to five grounded. It's harder to tell due to the forest canopy and the fact that some of them are subterraneans."

"How fast?"

"Much slower than expected, probably because of the grounded serpents. The entire group seems to be moving at the same rate; no doubt they want to attack at the same time."

June nodded. "Okay then. There's the problem. Give me a solution."

"We've already moved our mobile anti-air artillery here," a Colonel said, pointing to a hill nearby the massive hovercraft. "It's far enough away that any enemy units that break off to destroy them will risk being flanked by our own anti-aircraft guns, and close enough to cover a good bit of the dragons' expected effective attack range, as well as their eastern retreat path if they have to flee."

"Good. But not enough," June said simply.

Another man pointed to a cluster of markers above the Messiah. "We currently have all our fighters and bombers in the air and ready to sortie. I recommend an interception flight HERE," he pointed to a spot on the dragons' approach path. "If we can delay the advance, then-"

"Then we delay the same fight, but without desperately needed air support," June said firmly, cutting him off. "No. We're fighting dragons, here. We can realistically hope that our fighters and bombers will kill maybe two before they're wiped out in dog fighting, ASSUMING they get the element of surprise. No."

"They will stall the dragon flight, though!" he protested, "The extra time-"

"Isn't worth sending those pilots into a fight we know they'll lose," June interrupted again. Then she pointed to a spot above the Messiah. "They'll attack here, after the dragons have already begun their assault. A flanking maneuver should increase the effectiveness of their attacks and increase their longevity in combat."

"But that would leave the dragons all but unimpeded on their first run against us!"

June nodded. "That is acceptable."

"But General-"

"I am not prepared to throw down any 'last-ditch' or 'desperation' tactics," she said coldly, silencing the two men that had opposed her choice of tactics. "Nothing will suffice except for the complete eradication of the enemy. We HAVE the firepower. If the Messiah must weather the brunt of the assault, so be it. This craft was not built for pleasure cruises."

Another of the colonels looked grim. "It IS possible that the dragons could bring down the Messiah's shields on the first pass. Or even worse, that the dragons could board us, avoiding the anti-aircraft fire AND our air cover."

The silver-haired woman snorted. "Let them try. I'll personally reduce the filthy reptiles to dust and bones."

Several of the officers winced, none of them sure how much of the General's comment was confidence and how much was arrogance.

"The point, gentlemen, is to have as many guns hitting the lizards all at once. On their approach, they'll see a single target; the objective. After their first approach, they'll realize that they have several more targets, and will need to choose between them even as our vulcan cannons pluck them out of the sky." June smiled slightly at the prospect, and leaned further over the table.

"Now... give me another problem..."

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_Battle stations! All hands to battle stations! Radar contacts at eight miles! ETA ten minutes! This is not a drill! _

Rayden glanced over his shoulder as a group of technicians rushed by the entrance to the lounge, the man in charge screaming orders to the rest of his men. "Man, sure got busy in a hurry, did'n it?"

The bartender, not being assigned to any military post, sighed and slid another bottle of brandy over to the demon knight, casting an uneasy glance at the six empty bottle already piled to the side. "Yeah, well, that's war for ya. You almost done here?"

Rayden took the bottle and took off the cap. "How long 'til the lizards get 'ere?" He asked, a slight slurring betraying his inebriation.

"They said ten minutes," the man replied. "I got nowhere to go, since this is my station. All I have to do is make sure the cabinets are secure. You goin' back to your quarters?"

Rayden took a long swig of the brandy, and then let out a deep breath. "HELL no. I'm gonna be out there killin' lizards as soon as the damn leadwings GET here. Why's it take 'em ten minutes to clear eight miles?"

On the stool next to Rayden, K raised his head up above the counter momentarily to scowl at the demon knight. "For the umpteenth time, we're NOT lizards! You don't see me referring to everything humanoid as 'human' or 'mortal,' do you?"

"I'm sure if you keep whining about it I'll stop, despite me not stopping in the face of your constant whining so far," Rayden mumbled before gulping down more booze.

The bartender raised an eyebrow, and then leaned over the counter to get a better look at the little dragon. "Hey, did you want anything? I don't really..." he frowned. "Is there something wrong with that stool? It looks like the seat is about to fall off from here."

"Nope! It's fine!" K lied, ducking his head back down as he waited for the man's attention to turn elsewhere.

_Bang!_ Rayden slammed the latest empty bottle down next to him, and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. "Next."

The barkeep sighed. "If you were IEF, a human, or even just fifty pounds lighter I'd have cut you off three bottles ago. And were you serious about going out and fighting?"

"Of course I am!" Rayden said, his focus temporarily returning enough that his words came unhindered. "A little grog is good to have before a fight! Dulls the pain when you're wounded!"

"Might I suggest not going into battle drunk?" The barkeep asked drolly. "You might keep from getting wounded in the first place."

Rayden rolled his eyes. "I  
always  
get wounded. Now are you going to give me another or not?"

_Radar contacts at six miles! All non-combat personnel, secure your stations, retire to your quarters, and await instructions! All core engineers, report to the generator maintenance alcove for assignment! This is not a drill! _

The barkeep shook his head and closed the cabinet behind him. "Sorry pal, I've gotta keep this place locked up until they give either the all-clear or the evacuation order."

_Thump! _

The man blinked. "What was that?"

"Nothing!" K shouted up from the floor.

Rayden rolled his eyes and picked up the little dragon before heading out. Under some circumstances he might have protested being thrown out, but he understood the rationale of the orders, and besides that, barkeeping was one of the few professions other than soldiering that he had any kind of inherent respect for. "All right then. See ya around."

A minute later, Rayden stepped out of the officer's lounge, and then immediately stepped back to keep from being trampled by a squad of technicians carrying crates of what he guessed was ammunition.

"Man, this bites," the demon knight grumbled, shoving his hands into his pockets and walking down the hall after them.

"Tell me about it; no matter how strong they think this boat is, we're going to be taken apart! Then what happens to us?" K shivered.

Rayden scowled. "It's worse than that! How the hell am I supposed to fight? This is an aerial battle! If we were on foot, we could probably force the lizards to land and come to us, somehow..." he clicked his tongue. "I knew getting on this heap was a waste of time."

"More to the point, getting on this heap may get us killed," K drawled. "Never mind that we may have just dragged down an entire army with us."

"Feh. I'm not gonna die here," Rayden insisted, pounding a fist into his palm. "Not without stabbing one of those overgrown newts between the eyes. I'm not gonna die without a fight."

"I'd really prefer you leave off the modifier 'without a fight,' seeing how I'm probably going to be with you," K mumbled. "Isn't there somewhere safe around here?"

Rayden groaned. Just his luck that he'd end up saddled with the party mascot. "I don't want to hide somewhere safe!"

K swatted him in the side of his head. "Well, think about how other people feel once in a while!"

"I don't want to do THAT either!" The demon knight complained.

"You're so aggravating!"

"You're so weak!"

"Of course I am! I'm the brains of this outfit!"

Rayden slammed his fist into the wall, leaving a sizeable dent. "And I'm the muscle! So why don't you use your brains to get my muscle into a fight?"

K scowled as he pulled his head back, admitting to himself that Rayden had a point; though he had little to contribute if he were taken into battle, to have the demon knight hiding in the hold would be more than just a waste... and probably subject him to unprecedented levels of complaining, as well.

"All right, fine. If you're going to be a big baby about not getting a chance to die a brutal, violent death, we'll go help out. But this is how we're going to do it..."

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"Fall in! Fall in! All units, report!"

On the top deck of the Messiah, a small group of men and women rushed to get in a line before a single man barking orders.

These were not ordinary soldiers, as evidenced by the fact that they were all wearing wetsuit-like outfits with minimum embellishment; their belts and heavy combat boots were the only things that were not skin-tight, and even the rank pins and IEF emblem had been printed on the surface of the suits rather than being stitched or pinned on.

The ranking officer frowned as his eyes swept up and down the ranks of the Magi-soldiers, and he stiffened as he saw his superior officers approach from across the busy topdeck. "Atten-SHUN!"

June regarded Karen silently as the Colonel jogged to keep up with her, the pair meeting in the midst of scrambling technicians and gunners.

"... So, I take it you put your uniform on in a hurry," the silver-haired woman finally said.

Karen twitched. "You too?"

"Mm." Normally June would've been outraged at such a casual demeanor under such severe circumstances, but she had to admit that the recent sexual activity had left her rather at ease. "So, did you get to finish, or..."

"No," Karen said through clenched teeth, trying hard not to snap at her superior.

"Oh. How unfortunate," June said simply, halting for a moment as two gunners hauled an ammo crate across their path.

Karen was sorely tempted to ask who it was that had suddenly attracted the general's attention, but quickly decided against it; even if her superior was acting remarkably casual now, she had to be wary of crossing whatever line the general was acting on.

June noticed her subordinate's frustration, and successfully guessed as to the source of the uncomfortable silence. "You know... after this is over, we should go down to the bar and get some drinks."

The Colonel blinked in surprise, though she still looked wary. "General?"

"Managing these defenses can get exhausting, and I'm not getting any younger," June continued, stopping as another group of men hauled ammunition across their path, "it simply occurred to me recently that there's an awful lot of history between the two of us, yet we've never taken the opportunity to sit down and speak of it."

The gunners passed by, and the pair continued moving.

"A lot of history..." Karen mumbled. They had known each other for six years, but she'd never considered the older woman anything more than a superior and fellow soldier.

There was a bit of an awkward pause as a gaping hole in the deck opened up in front of them, and armored gunships rose out of the topdeck launch bays. "Did you know that Ranma was a volunteer subject for the Magi-soldier project?"

Karen blinked. "Uh? Oh, yes... he told me about that. He didn't make it, though. His mana resonance was too low."

June chuckled. "His mana resonance was fine. Not up to sorcerer level, but he would've made a fine wizard. No... the experiment was a catastrophic failure."

Karen blinked again, leaving her eyes wide. "Wh-What? What do you mean 'catastrophic'? It couldn't be that bad if he's still alive..."

"He's only still alive because... well, because he's Ranma Saotome. If he were caught in the epicenter of a nuclear holocaust, he and the cockroaches would be the only survivors... and then the cockroaches would all die." June chuckled. "He should have been dead after what happened... hell, he should be dead a hundred times over..."

Karen immediately began to ask the obvious question, but was drowned out by the sudden roar of engines as the four gunships took off into the sky.

As Karen started smoothing her hair that had been blown about by the kicked-up air, June spoke.

"I have quite a few stories about Ranma to tell... though none of them are as steamy as yours probably are." She smirked slightly as her subordinate flushed and looked away. "I'll tell you all about it sometime. But you have to do something for me."

"M-Ma'am?"

June suddenly looked more serious. "You have to survive this battle, Colonel. Have you ever fought a dragon before?"

Karen shook her head.

"Well, then it'll be a first for both of us," the general said. Then her expression soured as she approached the line of magi-soldiers. "Maybe your boyfriend could give us some tips. He's killed two of them. That I know about, anyway."

The Colonel in charge of organizing the magi-soldiers stood stiffly as June and Karen finally reached the line. "General! Awaiting orders!"

June nodded, her lips pressed into a thin line as she looked over the men and women gathered here. Each one was a magical powerhouse, capable of wiping out a tank column with a few words and the right gestures. And yet...

"Group one, retire to the hangar bays," June said without any preamble. "Group two, protect the aft of the ship. The final group will protect the shield generators."

The Colonel raised an eyebrow as the soldiers looked confused. "Ma'am? If we're deployed strictly on defense, we won't be able to use most of our best spells against the enemy without significant damage to the Messiah."

"I understand. You see... I don't know all that much about dragons..." the general admitted, pointing her index finger in the air and idly drawing a picture with a winding strand of light. "But they're quite resilient against magic. It would be best to allow our guns to engage the lizards and keep our mages back supporting the troops. Limit your attack spells to attacks of opportunity and last resorts. Colonel Molsk! Colonel Nemo! You're with me. Move out!"

Immediately the soldiers scattered to their assigned areas, the magi-soldiers joining squads of ordinary men tasked with protecting the ship from boarding actions.

"Leave the ones in the air to me and the big guns. You two cover me." June stepped past another group of engineers and stepped onto a lift, being joined by the two Colonels after a moment of hesitation.

The ride to the top of the bridge was silent, and Karen saw the man behind her, a Colonel by the name of Shawn Nemo, stare stoically into the sky, squinting at the thin, dark shapes far off in the distance.

"They're almost within firing range," he murmured. "Just what is going on here? Why are these creatures attacking?"

June smirked. "You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

The Colonel blinked. "General?"

"Tell me Nemo... do you believe that the actions of one man – not a general, or a leader, or anyone with that sort of influence – can control the tide of a battlefield? Of a WAR? That one fighter can single-handedly carve a path to victory for an entire nation... or lead a single small army to ruin?"

The older man frowned deeply, looking away for a moment. "I... I've never thought about anything like that. Maybe a powerful sorcerer-"

He stopped talking as June began to laugh ruefully. "We've been through so much, and gained so much power... and yet we're all still so naive."

The lift ground to a halt while the two Colonels were groping for something to say, and June turned and smirked at them.

"Come. The ancient beasts approach. Let's show them the might of foolish, ignorant human soldiers, shall we?"

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The plan had been simple. At least, it would have been considered simple by a human.

While the serpent kings were intelligent and could be perfectly sneaky, they rarely excelled at it. They were gifted with size, strength, and resilience to devastate entire armies. They weren't typically deployed in large formations, for the same reason that thermonuclear bombs weren't typically dropped in clusters. The dragons had a hard enough time keeping pace with each other between the grounded ones and the flyers; when the assault actually began, the primary concern was that they'd run into and blast each other descending on the same target.

It didn't occur to any of the beasts that the target could put up a real defense. While they expected that two or three of their number might fall to the sheer power of the humans' weapons, how could the puny mortals expect to repel ALL of them?

So the "plan" involved rushing forward and devastating the human army from above, while various earthbound dragons spread out and tracked down their ultimate objective: Dashtall's prize and the human worm that had dared to steal it. It was straightforward, and exposed the dragons to the full power of the enemy's weapons such that they would have equal opportunity to expose the humans to THEIR power. Precisely the type of strategy that dragons excelled at.

It also happened to be the type of strategy that humans excelled in exploiting.

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"The enemy is approaching at 800 meters!" The Messiah's captain turned a grim stare toward the weapon control station. "Send them an appropriate welcome."

"Aye aye, Captain," the officer said sharply. "Firing rocket flares..."

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Several block-shaped turrets, already loaded with the particular ammunition demanded by the mission, slowly turned toward the oncoming flight of serpents, the gunners below calculating the best trajectory for their weapons.

With a fiery hiss, the rockets within ignited, and each launcher sent a cluster of eight smoke-trailing darts into the sky toward the dragons.

The serpent kings, wary but not prone to caution, plowed forward straight into the sparse deluge of warheads, bracing themselves and making slight adjustments to their flight path so as to avoid as many of the missiles as possible.

Back on the Messiah, soldiers watching the approach pensively were instructed to shield their eyes.

_BANG! BANG! BANG!_ All around the dragons, the rockets exploded into bright, dazzling explosions of light, doing negligible damage to the serpents that the rockets hit, and temporarily blinding the dragons that were watching carefully as to avoid getting hit.

Screams of rage and sudden confusion spread through the flight as the dragons closest to the front began to veer off, exposing those behind to the second wave of flares. One dragon turned poorly, striking a large snow dragon and tangling their wings momentarily. The other serpent, being blinded itself, promptly snapped at its involuntary assailant, and the pair soon started spiraling to the ground in a mish-mash of gnashing teeth and talons.

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"Captain, the spearhead formation has broken. Four of the targets are maintaining course. The others are slowing down or changing their heading."

The weapon control technician nodded sharply. "The targets have entered combat range! Stations four through nine report target lock!"

The Captain nodded. "It begins now... open fire. Swat those filthy lizards from the sky."

"Yes, Captain! All battle stations! FIRE AT WILL!"

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Among the flight of serpents, a long, large black shape with tattered wings like a damaged mainsail and thick armor like a shell of iron spikes loomed above his brethren, his massive, gleaming black body passing those that had fallen victim to the humans' tricks.

His vision was fine, protected from the light by shaded lids that protected his particular strain of dragon from the glaring light of magma eruptions and the rare occasions on which sunlight penetrated the volcanic pits they inhabited. Several of his fellows were not so fortunate, but the great beast that led the assault paid them no heed, raising his altitude further to prepare for his plunge toward the target.

The massive creature didn't even notice as bits of mithril-tipped metal peppered its armored body, the projectiles having lost too much of their power at the present range to penetrate.

With an Earth-shaking roar, the shadow dragon began its descent, blue, ethereal light seeping from between its teeth as it dove toward the target.

_SHWOOM!_ A great beam of light sliced through the sky at the beast, striking the black serpent squarely in the head. The blast barely fazed the creature, breaking into a spray of prismatic lights as it broke over the black spines of the dragon's armor.

Dragons were not exactly prone to facial expression, but the massive beast gave something akin to a grin as he vomited a huge energy ball down directly toward the head of the Messiah; a sickly, roiling ball of shadow that leaked dark blue light as it sailed toward the deck.

_BWOOF!_ And then it exploded in mid-air, striking a plane of light and exploding to spill over the edges of the square-shaped energy shield in its path.

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June waited until the shadow dragon adjusted his course to miss the small barrier, and then lowered her hand.

"Let's deal with the large one. Colonel Molsk, cover me. Colonel Nemo, inform the bridge to prepare the main cannon."

The man nodded quickly, and picked up his radio as the general pointed into the sky, strands of light appearing around her arm and weaving themselves into an intricate, brightly glowing pattern.

Ancient powers forged from centuries of careful, exhaustive study and dangerous experimentation burned through implanted circuits in seconds, bending powers beyond nature into the crude patterns necessary to cast the spell.

"Force cage."

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_Vwom!_ The shadow dragon snapped its wings forward as thick bars of yellow light appeared in the air, rapidly stretching around the beast in a criss-crossing web and trapping it within a glowing cube.

Snarling as it hovered in place, the dragon whipped its tail about, smashing the halberd-like tip at the end into its mystical container.

Far below, June winced as she fed another surge of mana into her construct, the magical forces straining against the might of the serpent king. "ETA on that cannon?"

"Twenty seconds!"

"Good enough. Urgh!" June winced again. "They had better not miss..."

The shadow dragon howled as he gripped the bars of his cage in his talons, his wings beating viciously against the energies as a black miasma gushed from his mouth in a glowing tide of destruction.

Around the black beast, the other dragons in the flight that had either avoided or recovered from the flares glanced at the lead serpent as they passed by, curious and slightly nervous by the powerful conflict of magics.

One of the sharper-eyed dragons veered off, noting a titanic cannon barrel being lifted near the aft of the dreadnaught; it had no idea what the capacity of that particular weapon was to hit fast-moving, aerial targets, but it really didn't want to find out from personal experience.

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"Adjust cannon angle 1.7 degrees starboard!"

"Loading cycle complete! Ironbreaker shell ready for firing!"

"Firing calculations check out! Ballistic arc is clear!"

"Beginning firing cycle! Ubercannon is GO!"

"Please don't call it that..."

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_Thwoom!_ The sound of the main battle cannon firing was akin to a distant peal of thunder; a booming noise that felt like a great hammer striking the floor below.

The sight of the weapon firing wasn't particularly impressive; the foremost length of barrel slid backward into the next segment to absorb the recoil, and a shell was vomited out of the gaping mouth of the weapon with a burst of acrid-smelling smoke.

No, the show didn't begin until the great projectile struck its target, sailing lazily through the bars of the force cage before slamming clumsily into the great black beast writhing within.

The plain iron tip of the shell collapsed instantly against the dragon's scaly armor, utterly useless in penetrating anything with such hardness.

As the shell sunk further against the beast's chest, its mundane covering collapsing and tearing, a mechanism under the tip activated, and a delicate magitech device spread a phasing pattern over the exposed scales, splitting the matter apart such that something solid could pass through it for just 0.7 seconds.

Incidentally, that was the exact amount of time it took for a secondary charge within the shell to drive a spike of cluster bombs through the "magic hole" created in the armor.

_Ka-KRACK!_ Observers of the grim scenario were treated to the sight of a cannon shell impacting the giant serpent with all the apparent effectiveness of an empty soda can... right before the dragon's chest burst like a watermelon.

Great chunks of black scales rained down among a torrent of dark, steaming blood as the force cage faded away, not being needed to contain the half-dozen dragon parts free-falling toward the sandy ground below.

June smirked as she lowered her hands, quite pleased to see the distant dragons in the air whirl about in confusion and sudden panic.

"Colonel, have them begin the reloading cycle. How long will that take?"

Shawn quickly passed that question down, and scowled at the response. "It'll take another three minutes before they have another ironbreaker shell loaded. The gunnery sergeant wasn't expecting to use the big gun, so they didn't have them ship up extra ammunition ahead of time."

June frowned, and then shrugged as she sighed. "Can't be helped. That was more of a spur-of-the-moment trick, after all."

Karen, who had been watching the surroundings quite anxiously since she was given the task of covering her fellow magi, grimaced. "The others have begun their attack run! Incoming!"

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_Pwoof! Pwof! Shoooom..._

Great flares of energy lit up the surface of the Messiah's shields in dazzling displays of light, the great blue bubble of power rippling like the surface of a pond over the gentle curvature of the craft's bow.

The attacking dragons, which hadn't managed to get back into any sort of coherent formation after being blinded, having their lead annihilated, and being subjected to a vicious volley of anti-air fire, broke off from their respective dives toward the giant hovercraft, veering to either side and searching for something that looked like a weak spot.

One such beast was struck in the head with a lucky shot from the topside magi-cannon, and wobbled about clumsily in the air long enough for three vulcan cannons to converge on its wings and rip them to tatters.

A fire dragon passed overhead as that particular serpent tumbled to the ground, and then spat a bubbling orb of magma at the nearest offending weapon, snarling angrily as it watched its projectile splash against the dreadnaught's shields.

Passing by under another stitch of vulcan fire, the red drake gained altitude swiftly, jets of flame and smoke trailing from its wings as it picked up speed, eventually coming around and hovering over the aft of the Messiah, where the great cannon was located.

"Damnable human weaponsss," the dragon growled, a circle of glowing red light appearing in the air and rotating slowly.

With a feral roar, a thick beam of searing plasma vomited from the circle, plowing fiercely into the shields protecting the hull. The barrier, straining under the power, shuddered mightily, the smooth field of energy shuddering violently as arcs of electricity started sparking around the point of impact.

When the beam was exhausted, however, the shield remained intact, slowly smoothing itself out before fading away back to near-invisibility.

That much heat and fire placed havoc with local air flows, and the fire drake twitched as an unnaturally cold wind washed over him.

"Well now, wasn't THAT a great waste of time?" Sang an ice dragon as it swooped down behind its red counterpart, snow falling gently from the great sheets of icicles that extended from its scales. "Really Tarvul, you should stop flying off on your own. There's a reason we're attacking as a group."

The fire dragon twitched again, now being subjected to both the ice dragon's heat-draining aura AND her smug lectures. "Sssilence yourssself, blue... your breath would be better ssspent on the enemy!"

The ice drake, which never did like being referred to simply by the color of her scales, hissed as her eyes narrowed. "Get your sorry molten tail back to the main wing! The earthborne will be approaching soon; we MUST drive the craft down!"

The red dragon briefly glanced toward the target as a stream of vulcan fire swept over him, each bullet sizzling to droplets of molten metal as it breached the surface of his flame barrier. "Don't give me ordersss, you insssolent..." He blinked suddenly and his head snapped to the side, immediately attracting the blue dragon's attention.

"What? What are you look-" _THWOOM!_ A flechette round struck the female in the back, splitting apart on impact and sending white-hot shrapnel blades scything into her back and wings. "GRUAAGH!! BY THE ABYSS!!"

The ice dragon whirled around as bits of sundered ice rained down around her body, attempting to call up her own barriers before the sudden salvo of fire.

_THWOOM! THWOOM! THWOOM!_ The fire drake curved around and dove away as his companion vanished within a cloud of exploding shrapnel, cursing under his heated breath as he noted the series of gun batteries placed on the mountain behind the target.

'Damnation! Why would they put more guns there?' He thought angrily, curving away from the mountain in question as larger bits of ice dragon started to fall to the ground. 'Maybe to cover the rear of the weapon? But most of the others concentrated their attack on the front, and this craft is mobile. The only reason to really do such a thing would be... to cut off a retreat in that direction?'

The red dragon's wings pumped rapidly as he gained altitude, rising over the aft of the Messiah, and hopefully keeping close enough to the mother ship that the batteries on the mountains wouldn't fire. 'But the only way we'd flee in that direction is if we were attacked from-'

The serpent's eyes widened as he watched dozens of glittering craft appear in the distance, darting toward the battlefield on an intercept course straight toward the rear of the dragons' main assault.

"IT'S A TRAP!!"

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"Shields are at 30! They won't hold out much longer!"

"Somebody get that bloody lizard off the ship! Where are our goddamn guns?!"

"IT'S BREAKING THROUGH! All units, prepare to repel boarders!"

Karen winced at the chaos coming from below as she fired another salvo of freezing missile alongside June, taking aim at the sleek, silvery serpent that had decided to harass the magic-users standing atop the main observation tower.

"DIE, reptilian filth!" June snarled, great rings of light appearing around her arms before she sent numerous rockets of energy toward the attacking creature.

Much like the ice bolts, the magic blasts seemed to break over the dragon's skin like water parting around a rock, refusing to detonate in their normal, functional manner.

The dragon hissed in response and opened its mouth, vomiting forth a whistling stream of light.

"Black well!" The least powerful of the three officers promptly activated his primary defensive technique, and a swirling maelstrom of darkness appeared in front of the beam, the black clouds of magic eagerly sucking up the light.

"Disintegration!" June shouted as she countered the dragon's attack, a thick bolt of yellow lightning leaping from her fingertips to splash harmlessly across the beast's belly.

Sweeping its great, feathered wings upward, the holy dragon rose up above the soldiers, pinpricks of light converging around its head in preparation for another assault.

Then a missile hit it in the back. _BWOOM!_

"SCREEEEEEEEEEEE!!" All three of the officers clapped their hands over their ears as the wounded serpent bellowed painfully, and June scowled as the creature tumbled down out of the air, landing flat onto the weakened energy barrier.

The barrier writhed violently against the heavy mass that had settled onto it, shaking and crackling against the serpent's skin to little effect.

The holy dragon, meanwhile, swiftly shook off its shock and vertigo, and sunk its gleaming talons into the energy shield, its great maw curling into a smile when its claws slowly slipped through the surface and emerged below the powerful barrier.

Karen cursed as a pair of bombers veered off from their attack pattern, not daring to use their ordnance in such close proximity to the shield and risk breaching it. "Blue wing!"

Points of blue light appeared around the colonel's hand, and swiftly grew into lance-sized icicles before rocketing toward the holy dragon one after another. While this worked much better against the considerable magic resistance of the dragon, the projectiles still barely manage to penetrate the thick, luminescent skin before shattering.

"Tch!" June grit her teeth, mentally running through all the abilities she had on hand as the dragon slowly sank further down through the shield, its gaping, dagger-toothed maw slipping through the wall of rippling power.

"General! We can't hold here! We've got to fall back to the main deck!" Shawn shouted, launching his own volley of dark missiles that crashed upon the serpent to no apparent effect.

"Agreed," June said reluctantly, floating up into the air. "Colonel Molsk, take Colonel Nemo down. I'll find someone to help take down this monstrosity." She gestured disdainfully at the glimmering holy dragon, and her subordinates sweatdropped.

"Yes, General!" Karen didn't bother to salute before snatching up the other colonel and levitating away from the platform, already sensing a considerable power buildup from the holy dragon above them.

_FREEEEEEM!_ A river of white-hot light poured down from the beast's maw, neatly missing June but rocketing down toward the deck and plowing into the not-inconsiderable armor covering the deck.

After a mere two seconds, the armor melted away completely, and hot, destructive power swept into the officer's quarters located behind the Messiah's bridge, vaporizing the contents of two separate rooms and killing a random crew member that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Karen landed as the beam trickled away to nothing but a shimmering strand of light, and gently dropped Colonel Nemo on the deck. "Get a squad over here! We've got a breach! We need heavy weapons on the deck, pronto!"

"Colonel!" A young sergeant that looked to be in quite the panic rushed up to her, the barrel of his rifle smoking from use. "There's another breach? We still haven't gotten the first one!"

Shawn grimaced as he looked about. "There're two of those bastards in-"

"SSSH!" Karen suddenly hissed, and the soldiers fell quiet, their silence making way for a constant, humming noise that floated over the growl of the nearby vulcan cannons.

"What the hell?"

"Sounds like... a fly?"

_VvvvvvvvvvvvVVVVVVVVVVVVHM!_

The soldiers looked at each other as the buzzing sound got louder, and then promptly dove for cover as a massive, emerald-green shape rocketed over the edge of the deck, its four, gleaming wings pumping furiously against the air and its long, claw-tipped tail whipping about behind it.

Karen twitched as she stared at the new arrival. "It's... It's a dragonfly."

Shawn nodded in agreement. "A gigantic dragonfly with huge claws and teeth and... stuff... coming out of its tail."

Said dragonfly (known more commonly as a swamp dragon) stared down at the humans through coal-black eyes as they started taking aim, not about to wait for the strange creature to take action on its own.

Winding around, the creature showed remarkable agility in bending its body just out of the way of an ice lance before it disgorged a large, sticky ball from its tail, dropping it onto the deck with a wet _Splat!_

Immediately after unloading its cargo, mithril-tipped rifle rounds started peppering its body, as the dragon's agility was no match for the concentrated fire of a full squad of soldiers, and its iron-hard carapace no match for the powerful armor-piercing cartridges.

"It's getting away!"

"Aim for the wings! Higher! Try to cut its mobility!"

Swirls of icy snowflakes gathered around Karen's hands as she began to summon a blizzard, when her eye caught sight of the slimy ordnance that the beast had dropped in the middle of the deck.

'Can't be a bomb... it's not close enough to hurt any of us, unless it's very powerful, in which case there's no reason to drop it up here where we might be able to get rid of it rather than down below... wait, is it MOVING?'

The function of the gooey blob became abundantly clear when it exploded in a burst of slime and pointed limbs, dozens of small creatures emerging from the egg sac all at once before orienting on the nearby soldiers.

"WHAT THE HELL ARE THOSE?!"

"Forget the dragon! Over there!" The soldiers quickly turned their weapons on the tiny, slime-covered monsters scrambling over the deck toward them, but precious seconds were spent in confusion over the change of targets and checking their line of fire to ensure they wouldn't shoot their own men.

One soldier was too slow in deciding upon a target, and his rifle fired a final, useless burst into the air as one of the vicious, slimy insecticoids leapt for his throat, digging its mandibles and legs into the man's neck as more of its kin swarmed the man's legs.

Karen, for her part, was not amused at all when half a dozen of the vile little things started clambering for her and Shawn. "Of all the stupid..." Growling, she held up one hand that began to glow a bright blue, power building in the minute space between her thumb and forefinger. "Haaz break!" _Snap!_

With a snap of her fingers, four of the creatures froze instantly into urchin-esque ice balls. "Die, vermin!" _Crack!_ Those same creatures exploded like landmines, shredding one more of the monsters in a hail of razor-sharp ice shards.

The final little monster let out a confused hiss before it lunged, having been spared from the spell by sheer luck.

"Void bullet!" _Shzak!_ That same creature was rent apart in mid-leap by a bolt of darkness, and Colonel Nemo nodded grimly as he lowered his hand. "The attacks on the shield seem to be lessening. It seems that we're winning the air battle."

Karen gave a distracted "Sure," as she prepared another spell, glancing about the deck for more of the spawnlings. Although most of the creatures had been shot apart while scrambling for the soldiers, it was possible for something that small to slip into a hard-to-reach area and wait in hiding for a particularly inconvenient moment to attack. 'No way were those actual dragon hatchlings... no dragon reproduces in those kinds of numbers, and I doubt a mother dragon would find her true offspring that expendable...'

_Vvvvvvvvvvvhhhm..._

Karen cursed as the loud humming sound returned, and the soldiers quickly ducked back down behind cover, only occasionally glancing at the deck to ensure that no more spawnlings were attacking.

_VvvvvVVVVVVVVVVVHMMM!_ The swamp dragon shot up over the edge of the deck, swooping upward gracefully as its tail dripped a dark, greenish ooze down onto the platform below.

The soldiers all started to take aim, when Colonel Nemo waved their guns down.

"Hold your fire! Hold your fire!" He shouted, his face darkening.

Karen looked at him questioningly, lowering her head from the sky. "Shawn?"

And then she saw them. Dozens of the spawnlings, perhaps even hundreds, started clambering over the edge of the deck wall ringing the hull of the Messiah, their tiny, foetid jaws snapping angrily. A glance over her shoulder revealed the same on the opposite side of the deck; a veritable carpet of claws and teeth climbing onto the metal flooring.

Karen's heart started pounding as the soldiers started dashing from their positions, which were mostly near the edge of the deck. The spawnlings were little to no threat to her; she could destroy a great mass of them with only slightly more effort than it took to fire a gun, and she could fly. Her men – not to mention her fellow Colonel – could not fly. Worse yet, her spells that were most effective in dealing with a teeming carpet of death would have extremely unfortunate effects upon allies caught within the blast radius. Friendly fire was not an option for her.

A vulcan turret gunner that was too slow in leaping from his station screamed as the spawlings bit into his legs, dragging him down into the sea of claws and teeth.

Karen grit her teeth as she prepared another spell. "Damn it all! Gather together! Use your frags! Don't you dare lose to a bunch of overgrown beetles!"

"Callidus dome!" Shawn shouted, catching a good number of the creatures within a meter-wide dome of black and grinding them up. Several soldiers dropped grenades next the phenomenon as they retreated to the center of the deck, constantly tearing into the swarm of spawnlings with their automatic rifles.

Karen thrust her hands out as the explosions started behind her. "Ice hammer!" Great frozen cylinders coalesced above the spawnlings, and dropped one by one upon the swarm, crushing those creatures underneath into paste. "Damn it! It's not enough! We have to-"

_Splap!_

The Colonel's head snapped to the side as she heard a wet impact, and she gaped as another slimy bundle of eggs settled onto the cold metal deck. 'I'm between spells! Just a few more seconds!' "Shawn! Somebody! Anybody! The egg sack! Kill the-"

_Thunk!_ Rather than being blasted with a bolt of darkness, or being ripped apart by rifle fire, Karen watched as a single throwing knife – glowing red and glimmering, at that – embedded itself into the slimy wad just as it began to swell. _FWOOSH!_

The swamp dragon clicked its mandibles angrily as it saw its last clutch of spawnlings engulfed in flames, and then looped around in the air to try and find the source of this new interference.

_Thunk! Thunk! Thunk! Thunk!_ A dozen knives flew into the encroaching swarm of spawnlings, and then one by one, each of the weapons exploded like a napalm round, blasting waves of fire into the vile creatures and sending shock waves of confusion and panic through the teeming mass.

The soldiers didn't flinch or freeze, and certainly didn't complain. They adjusted their fire to shoot into the spawnlings that were making their way around the flames, trying to keep the entire swarm at bay.

Karen, being an officer, was more sensitive to the changing strategic conditions, and immediately sought out the source of the weapons after instructing Colonel Nemo to keep attacking.

_Shwwwh..._

. It was only the slightest change in air pressure that alerted the swamp dragon to the attack, but it was enough. The beast suddenly did a barrel roll, its long tail curling into a corkscrew as a nearly invisible blur sailed past.

_Skrak!_

Ranma clicked his tongue as he grabbed onto a piece of scaffolding, having felt only a slight disturbance in his grip on his sword as he had passed his target; a glancing hit, at best.

The swamp dragon curled around to face its attacker, an alien hiss issuing forth from its throat, and Ranma got the distinct impression that he was being insulted even though he couldn't understand a thing. 'Huh. Guess that telepathy thing isn't perfect.'

"Ranma!" Karen shouted in a dizzying mixture of joy, hope, and dread.

"Sorry I wasn't here earlier, but I had some stuff to take care of," the pigtailed man shouted down to her, making sure to keep his eyes on the insect-like dragon. "Just hold off those little freaks, okay? I'll take care of this guy!"

Karen actually would have suggested differently – Ranma's talents would be much more useful in fighting off the spawnlings, while her soldier's weapons were apparently quite effective against the dragon – but the situation was moving too quickly for her to try and manage people who didn't take orders from her. "Be CAREFUL! There are more that got through the shield!"

"Yeah, I know. Just take care of yourself, all right?" The wanderer waved his sword about experimentally in front of him, noting how the dragon's tail swayed back and forth to match the movements. "Okay then... let's see what this freak can do..."

The swamp dragon quickly tired of hovering in front of the human waiting for him to act, and suddenly lifted upward through the air, its wings beating furiously. Its tail curled up under its body, and the tip bulged.

"GWAH!" Ranma shouted in surprise and leapt as a jet of thick green slime blasted toward him, splattering all over the scaffolding and mast that he had been holding on to. Twisting in mid-air, he tried to slash at the dragon in mid-air, only for the creature to jerk out of the way just in time.

Ranma touched off of another mast with his foot, leaping higher to grab onto another set of scaffolding high above.

He clicked his tongue as he saw his previous perch rapidly dissolving. "Great. Acid. Dangerous AND gross."

Ranma snapped one hand to the side, causing several knives to slip out of his sleeves and into his hand. He clenched one between his teeth, and then started building his flame aura. 'Most of its attacks seem to come from its tail. If that's the case...'

The swamp dragon bobbed up and down in the air rapidly, the buzzing from its wings nearly drowning out the symphony of gunfire below. Then it whipped its tail around, a glimmering green light coming from the tip.

_SHZAK!_ Ranma had no clue what the luminescent green blade was that came from the dragon's tail, and didn't really care so long as it missed him. Sailing over the attack, he tossed a few throwing knives at the creature, only to see that the knives wavered in mid-air and veered off-target due to the vibrations in the air from the creature's rapidly pumping wings. The blades either bounced off the beast's carapace or stuck into it shallowly, none doing any real damage.

The swamp dragon took note of its opponent's failed assault, and zoomed toward the pigtailed warrior while he was still in the air, its tail glowing once more as it prepared to strike.

'Just a little closer...' Ranma thought as he sailed through the air, looking for all the world like a helpless target.

The tail stabbed forward as the swamp dragon rose above its target, a long, emerald lance of power emerging to spear the nimble warrior through the chest.

Of course, Ranma was a fighter who had specialized in mid-air acrobatic combat long before he had ever even met a Ninja. Twisting impossibly, he grabbed onto the mouth of the tube-like extremity and pulled the rest of his body out of the way, barely singing the edge of his leather armor on the strange magic energy. Flipping his ancient, rusted katana about in his hand, he then stabbed it deep into the creature's tail, impaling it.

"SCREEEEEEEEEEEH!" The swamp dragon promptly began thrashing the damaged limb about, flinging globs of acid, and eventually Ranma, haphazardly onto the deck below.

Ranma did a back flip and landed rather heavily on his feet, wincing.

Then he spat out the knife he had in his mouth into his hand and then stabbed the spawnling that was lunging for his leg. "Stupid little freaks. More trouble'n they're worth."

The swamp dragon hissed viciously as it glared down at the martial artist through large, gleaming black eyes. Then it brought its tail around, preparing to launch a cascade of poison down upon the insolent mortals.

_Sploosh!_ As Ranma had intended, the acid broke upon the flat of the sword impaled in the dragon's tail, mixing about chaotically in the beast's tail and gushing out of its wound in a cocktail of lethal venoms and hot blood.

_SHWEEM!_ Then the beast's writhing form was blasted back into one of the huge armor shields elevated over the deck, the Messiah's magi-cannon nearly punching a hole right through its carapace.

The dragon was slammed hard into the adamantite surface, and then slowly slid off in a crumpled heap, leaving thick streaks of foaming green slime to mark the impact.

Ranma kicked away another spawnling and then drew his pistol, blasting another that was scrambling for the flank of the soldiers on the deck. 'Looks like more men are coming up from below. And the little freaks are thinning out quickly, now. Then that just leaves-'

"SSSHRRRRRRRREEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAH!!!" An ear-splitting roar sent Ranma rolling across the deck, seeking quick cover as the noise played havoc with his senses.

A series of bright lights exploded above, and the pigtailed warrior cursed as the great shield over the Messiah's hull glimmered and shook, the energies rapidly decaying before the barrier vanished entirely.

'Okay, time to get my bearings,' Ranma said, quickly picking off a few more spawnlings that were stumbling about from the noise with his sidearm. 'The dragonfly is down for the count. Most of the flyers are being pummeled. The white dragon...' Ranma winced as he watched a fantastic flash of lights flare in the distance. 'White dragon's still around. I could help with that. Or-'

_Thump!_ A pair of heavy boots landed on the deck as a storm dragon boarded the vessel proper, his light blue scales melting into flesh as his bony black horns splintered into a thick mane of bright blue hair.

"Hmmm... this doesn't look good," Ranma mumbled as the new arrival glared at him.

"The target..." the dragon heaved breathlessly, as if speaking was uncommon to it. "Kill him... kill him... KILL HIM!!" Great crackling tendrils of energy seeped from the dragon's fingertips, wrapping together to create writhing blades of lightning.

Ranma rolled his eyes. "You DO realize that you're on enemy turf, right scaly? That big bug of yours could only distract the soldiers for so long. You're outgunned and outnumbered."

The storm dragon's lips curled into a smile, and his eyes flared a brilliant blue. "Am I... now?"

And it was at that point that a great, armored head rose above the edge of the deck.

Followed by a smaller, sleeker head. Except that this one was on the other side, behind Ranma.

The pigtailed man glanced behind him, then forward again. Then he scratched his head.

"Huh. Yeah, I guess you're fine. So... any of you guys want to talk this out like rational sentient beings? I'm sure that if we just sit down and discuss our diffe-YOW!"

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_WHUMP!_ June leapt upward in a spiral of glimmering lights as a snow dragon collapsed onto the deck below, the serpent bleeding critically from hundreds of bullet-holes torn into its relatively soft skin.

"Kais sever!" With a sharp wave of her hand, a crescent arc of light scythed into the dragon's head, putting an end to its irritating shrieks.

With barely a glance at her casual handiwork, June turned back to her former target clinging to one of the adamantite "roofs" to avoid vulcan fire.

The holy dragon spat out a bolt of light, and the IEF general quickly reinforced her personal barrier against the force of the projectile.

"Damned lizard!" June cursed, more energy seeping around her arms, ready to be expelled in waves of pure destruction.

Of course, the IEF general was becoming more and more certain that "waves of pure destruction" might as well have been waves of lukewarm tap water against the holy dragon. Every spell she cast fizzled instantly upon touching the serpent's gleaming scales.

"Someone get me some firepower over here!" She demanded, her voice being drowned out in the din of gunfire that had consumed the deck. "Kais sever!"

_SCHLUNK!_ The light blade sailed through the air, striking the roof shielding above the dragon and slicing off a portion to fall down atop her enemy.

The dragon hissed as it curled out of the way, its body gliding through the air as if it were in water.

Before June could yell ineffectually for help once more, spheres of bright light began to coalesce around the holy dragon, forming vague patterns around its serpentine body.

June spat a nasty word in Hebrew. 'Is this all I could do, after all? Just wrap magic around myself and survive until help comes? How much longer? How much longer can I possibly stand up to the power of a dragon?'

The lights around the dragon flared, and glowing strings of energy appeared between the spheres in an arcane pattern that would have only made sense to a magi far more specialized and a few hundred years older than the Israeli officer.

The holy dragon reared its head back elegantly, ignoring a few stray bursts of rifle fire in its side as it began to sing a single, high-pitched note.

_SHREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEM!_ As one, the spheres of light unleashed thick streams of energy forward, the beams converging haphazardly on June's location as she gasped and squeezed her eyes shut, feeding all her strength into her barriers.

_Shwoom!_

June couldn't help but notice the general lack of searing pain, numbness, or in fact any sort of sensation that might indicate that she was in the process – or had completed the process – of being pounded into a molten soup by the battery of light blasts.

Being quite familiar with light magic, she kept her eyes shut tight for two more seconds, allowing any additional flare bursts to fade before she risked sight once more.

Kaze smiled down at her, holding his staff in the air. All around them, the light beams circled wildly like a cyclone, bending around the glimmering light of the priest's staff.

June frowned. "You're late."

Kaze shrugged unapologetically. "It took me some time to work up the nerve to come out here. I'm not exactly the brave, heroic type." He idly turned toward the confused-looking holy dragon. "Light of judgment, let the wicked that would oppose me feel the weight of their sins. Mirror repentia." _SHWOOOM!_

All at once, the energy beams rocketed off toward the dragon, eliciting a startled shout from the beast, but little else in the way of results.

June sweatdropped. "Aren't you supposed to shout when you're casting spells? You sound like you're lecturing it, not attacking it."

Kaze grimaced. "Well, I'm tired. Not that I should be complaining about that, I suppose... but it's just as I thought; this creature's magic resistance is too high. I won't be able to do much more than distract it and block its attacks."

The holy dragon hesitated for a moment, and then started glowing again, beginning another silent incantation.

"Well, then we should find someone else to handle this overgrown snake and find a different target," June groused. "You go ahead and distract it for a bit. I'll be back." With a brief mumble, a circle of light appeared on the deck, and June sunk right through it, the lights fading as she slipped underneath the reinforced metal floor and into the level below.

Kaze blinked. "Did... Did she just abandon me to this beast after I saved her?" He shuddered, which had as much to do with the quickly gathering magics above him as his current predicament. "I'd heard the stereotypes, but these Jewish girls are **vicious**."

Eldritch powers curled around the head of the holy dragon as it prepared to unleash its attack, the magic forming a small vortex above the beast's head.

"Mmm... not good," the priest snatched up a wad of talismans in his hand, and tossed them out in front of him, the slips of paper fluttering haphazardly into the air before suddenly snapping themselves vertical and shifting into a circular pattern.

A glowing yellow eye appeared above the holy dragon, and a stream of shimmering bolts of energy started pouring out of it in Kaze's general direction, hammering the talisman shield as well as the deck around him and the cabin behind him.

'I wonder how long I can keep this up... oh well. I never did want to live forever.' Stepping back, he swung his staff about in his hand like a baton. "The wicked that masquerade as creatures of holy persuasion can suffer only annihilation as penance for their deception," he said conversationally as the magic eye continued spewing energy bolts and he continued powering his barriers. "Perish, serpent. Light of Ul'naan!"

"Reeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaugh!"

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"Damn lizards! Back off!" Ranma shouted as he dashed away from a thick jet of poison, flinging knives at the human-form dragon as he moved.

"KILL HIM!! Kill him quickly!" The storm dragon shouted, ignoring the pinpricks from the small blades as his eyes flashed. With a gesture, streams of lightning lashed out at the nimble human in thick, crackling tendrils.

Ranma blocked the lightning as best he could with his seemingly indestructible gauntlet, wary of the rock dragon's next move; the dragons had been attacking one at a time to keep from hurting each other, and while that made it much easier to avoid the attacks, he was still hard-pressed enough that he couldn't manage an effective counter-attack.

The rock dragon opened its maw, and green motes of light appeared around its mouth before being sucked toward the quartz-like crystal shard embedded in its forehead.

_Swsh! Zzzzap!_ Ranma ducked another slash from the lightning-blade, turning to try and sweep his opponent before the rock dragon finished whatever it was doing. The serpent in human form landed on his hands and then pushed himself up off of the deck, flipping to his feet.

_Schungk!_ Then he shouted in surprise as nearly two dozen throwing knives stabbed into his torso, knocking him over.

'Useless! I'm never going to win with these two big ones on my back!' A slight cracking noise seemed to drive the point home, and Ranma backflipped away as the space where he had just been standing exploded upward into a blossom of razor-sharp crystal shards.

'That wasn't so bad,' he thought as he landed. 'Next is the black one... wait...' He suddenly moved very quickly.

_SHRAK! SHRAK! SHRAK!_

"Crap!" Ranma leapt erratically as more bursts of crystals emerged from the deck, following his evasion path... which seemed to be leading toward the smaller, black-scaled dragon, he couldn't help but notice.

The venom dragon had evidently tired of lobbing poisonous vomit from the relative safety of the ship's edge, and its snake-like body slipped down onto the deck before racing toward its prey.

On the plus side, this stopped the rock dragon from trying to turn his legs into shredded jerky. Everything else about the situation was on the minus side.

"Damn it! Damn it damn it damn it!" Ranma cursed as the black serpent snapped at him with curved, wet fangs. As he jumped back, the dragon's tail whipped about and swatted him out of the air, sending him rolling across the deck into the storm dragon.

The dragon in human form laughed sadistically as he stabbed both his lightning blades down into the hapless human... and then watched said human vanish into a puff of smoke. "What? What... is this?"

Ranma's form flickered into view behind him, and the storm dragon was taken clean off his feet by a roundhouse kick striking him in the head and sending him flying into one of the nearby vulcan cannons that had already been destroyed in the battle.

'Can't use that trick too much,' the pigtailed fighter chided as the rock and venom dragons oriented on him. 'I know these things can see through the doppelganger technique if they try. That might not work again.'

The venom dragon hissed as dark green smoke began seeping from the corners of its mouth, preparing to unleash a lethal barrage of toxins at its prey.

The dragon blinked, hesitating. Something was wrong, here. Wait! From behind!

"VENOM SLASH!!"

It was only the creature's exemplary senses that allowed it to whip its body out of the path of a lethal sword slash just in time, allowing the dark blade to sink its crackling, writhing energies into the deck of the hovercraft as if the reinforced armor was Styrofoam.

K winced as the black serpent turned to face the new threat, its forked tongue sliding out from between rows of poisonous teeth. "Okay. Element of surprise: gone. Do you think we could move off to the sidelines where I can safely shout encouragement and combat advice without risking being eaten, please?"

Rayden ignored the tiny dragon as he pulled up his greatsword and pointed it at his new enemy. "Finally, a real fight!"

"It's about time!" Ranma shouted as the storm and rock dragons launched magic beams at him. "Now get a few of these jerks off my back! K, go get my sword! It's in the overgrown dragonfly!" After a moment, a series of stalagmites punched out of the ground, and Ranma hopped up on top of them before withdrawing his Nighthawk pistol and unloading it into the storm dragon, stunning it.

"Gotcha, boss!" Rayden grinned as K grumbled and took off of his shoulder. "Venom dragon, eh? Meat's no good, but I know some guys who'll pay a buttload if I carve out those poison glands of yours."

The serpent king looked down its snout at the demon knight, its lips curling back. "Hssss... I smell angel wings and demon blood... so you're of the cursed ones? I didn't think there were any left..."

Rayden's grin promptly became an annoyed expression. "Hmph. Put your claws up, lizard. Videm gyoani!" Black energies started to gather around Rayden's feet, slowly warping around his legs and climbing upward. "Father of war, grant me fortitude and strength to fight on when this feeble mortal shell fails! Blood aura!"

The venom dragon promptly released a blast of corrosive poison gas that obscured the dark paladin's form as the shadows reached up from below, embracing him in a sheathe of darkness.

There was a moment of hesitation from the beast, where the din of the surrounding combat closed in around it, confusing its senses. 'Did the poison work? If so, there's no point in fighting this fool; he'll be dead in minutes.' The dragon wasn't counting on it, though. A good number of demons had spectacular resistance to poison, and spectacular constitutions besides.

It was thoroughly vindicated as the dark broadsword Rayden carried came flying through the noxious cloud, spinning about like a boomerang. The venom dragon barely managed to curve out of the way in time, feeling its armor give slightly as it got nicked in passing.

A moment later, Rayden followed his blade, toxic smoke trailing from his body as black lightning crackled around his fist. "SHADOW BREAK!!" _BWOOM!_

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Ranma was glad to see Rayden get one of the dragons off his back. He really was.

_BWOOOM!! Crackle! Gzack!_

But even so, fighting two dragons head-on was leagues beyond what he considered a sensible fight.

"Gah!" Ranma hit the ground rolling as a tongue of lightning overshot him, scorching the Messiah's deck.

The rock dragon promptly darted its head forward and snapped at its nimble prey, aiming to crush the human between jagged, diamond-hard teeth.

Ranma recovered easily enough, jumping over the snapping jaws and landing atop the massive, armored head of the beast. "You know, this is really starting to get annoying. We've got a whole damn ARMY here, you know? But here I am, fighting on my own again."

The dragon quickly tired of Ranma's complaints, and swung his head to the side, attempting to crush the warrior to paste against the topside supply compartments.

After jumping off to safety at the last possible moment, Ranma did his best to block an incoming bolt of lightning with his gauntlet, but felt most of the attack sink into his arm, numbing the muscles even as they burnt his flesh.

"DIE!! DIE!! Why won't you DIE?!" The storm dragon snarled as he closed quickly, a bubble of crackling electricity whirling around him.

Ranma landed lightly enough, shaking his right arm to get some feeling into it. "My physician advised against that, actually. DRAGON FIST!"

The human-form serpent's eyes widened as a blazing dragon's maw emerged from the human's left hand, sailing for his head as he closed to melee range.

_KA-BWOOM!!_ The storm dragon was sent reeling from the blow, his lightning barrier fizzling instantly before the strength of the attack. Sliding across the metal floor a ways, he bounced off the surface before sailing over the edge of the deck, and temporarily out of the fight.

Breathing heavily, Ranma quickly turned to locate the next immediate threat.

And stared straight into the dark, dank maw of the rock dragon as it darted across the deck to snap at him again.

_BWAM!_ The pigtailed man blinked as a thick beam of light suddenly slammed into the side of the beast's head, halting its attack and stunning the creature.

Immediately afterwards, dozens of rifle rounds started peppering the dragon's carapace, digging numerous tiny holes past its thick, horned armor and into the slightly more sensitive flesh below.

The creature howled angrily at the sudden attention, and turned its head sharply to address its new foes.

Ranma breathed a sigh of relief upon seeing the creature's focus shifting elsewhere, but nonetheless prepared himself to attack; it would hardly do for some random soldiers to be killed in the effort to save his life.

"Are you unharmed, Saotome?" Came a smug-sounding voice from behind him.

He wouldn't admit to anyone that he was surprised, but it took a good two seconds for Ranma to figure out who it was behind him, and another second for him to decide not to fill that person full of knives.

"... Huh. And you're... wait, wait, I've almost got it... Emcee?"

Emrey's cocky demeanor vanished rapidly. "That's 'Emrey,' human." While it was hardly outside the bounds of reason for Ranma to have forgotten his name after their brief encounter, it thoroughly annoyed him that the wanderer hadn't even turned around to identify him, instead keeping his attention focused on the rock dragon.

"Oh, right. I'm a bit scratched up, but it's nothing serious. Thanks for asking. Toodles!" Before the assassin could offer any protest, Ranma's form flickered, and he vanished into a blur of motion.

Ranma dashed atop the guardrail along the edge of the main deck, jumping high and then dropping down hard atop the rock dragon's head. The beast's jaws impacted the deck and snapped shut, consequently cutting off the energy beam it was about to fire from its mouth and dispersing it ineffectually.

"Ranma!" Karen shouted. She was at the head of the soldiers making a sweep of the Messiah's deck, her hands aglow with icy magics. "Careful! It's the-"

"Can't talk now!" He said, leaping from the serpent's head right before shards of crystal began to circle him and fire toward him like darts. "K! Sword! NOW!!"

The little metadragon was grumbling to himself as he dragged Ranma's weapon across the deck, the rust-caked edge held firmly in his beak. "Coming... coming..."

Not wanting to wait any longer, Ranma dashed full tilt across the length of the deck, leaping up and rebounding off of a mast – which promptly became a pincushion for dozens of crystal needles – before landing in front of a rather startled K.

He snatched up his weapon, and was about to mutter a quick "Thank you," when he noticed something important. "HEY!! This blade used to be longer!" He turned a rather harsh glare on his pet/companion, who winced before glaring right back.

"Don't get on MY case about it! It was stuck all the way through the swamp dragon, and the only way I could get it out was by clipping the tip off a bit!"

"Then why didn't you just wait? This is a Ninja heirloom weapon, dammit!" Ranma growled.

"I thought you needed it now!" K growled back.

"Not if that meant you EATING it!"

"It's not like I wanted to, you know! That thing tastes like lead!"

Ranma doubtlessly would've continued the verbal fight, had not the physical fight taken priority so abruptly. A huge, nearly invisible wave of pressure slice through the air, and the pigtailed man leaned back sharply, causing the disruption to miss lopping off his nose by a scant few millimeters.

"Well, great. The human wannabe's back." Ranma slashed his sword through a second air wave, causing a loud _CRACK!_ as the air blades met and negated each other. "This isn't over yet, K. You have to learn to stop eating my stuff."

K snorted as he took off into the air again, seeking a safer perch from which to watch. "Hmph. You guys are such a drag sometimes. It's always complain, complain, complain..."

Ranma slipped to the side as a crackling lightning flashed past his arm, positioning his sword behind him. "Back off, lizard!" Darting forward, he punched the storm dragon in the solar plexus before following with a sword strike, loosing a thin spray of blood as the serpent king howled in rage.

The dragon's return strikes were each cleanly parried, and as it pushed forward to try and press its strength advantage, Ranma suddenly dashed forward.

"SILVER BLITZKRIEG!" _Shing! Zslash! Shnk!_

The storm dragon's world exploded into pain as his target seemed to burst into a flurry of slashing blades, cutting through his enhanced skin with disturbing ease.

Snarling, lightning curled around the dragon's fist before he plunged it recklessly at his opponent through the whirlwind of silvery slashes. _Crackle! BOOM!!_

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Why the hell did I come up here?!" Kaze shouted as a stream of white-hot light ate away at his shields, disintegrating two talismans in its path that had attempted – and barely succeeded – in weakening the attack.

The holy dragon hissed as its breath petered out, and it hissed again as the priest wobbled. The foolish little cleric hadn't done much to hurt it, as his light magic was utterly useless against it even **without** the dragon's considerable magic resistance, but Kaze was proving to be a considerable annoyance, and boasted his own very impressive defenses. It certainly didn't help that the two opponents shared the same magic type; while the holy dragon could easily ignore the effects of light magic and Malakai's holy judgment, Kaze had a limited, but infuriating, ability to throw the dragon's spells back at it.

"Come ON! Somebody help me!" The evon shouted as he rooted around in his sleeves for more talismans. Grabbing a few flare spell strips, he flung them desperately at the serpent king.

The dragon snorted and spat out several yellow projectiles that each homed in on the incoming talismans, striking the enchanted paper slips and reducing them to ash.

Kaze groaned. "Heroism was a lot more attractive when all I had to do was sleep with beautiful young acolytes and talk about how great I was going to be. Where the hell is my support?!"

_Clunk! Whrrrrrr..._ Although a distant noise and slight vibration floated over the deck, it didn't distract either him or his draconic opponent.

With a guttural snarl, the holy dragon dove down onto the deck, its serpentine body sliding around a mast and several crates.

Kaze growled and tapped his staff against the deck. _Vwom!_

Appearing above the dragon, he tried gathering his mana to him, becoming even more aggravated as he felt the mystical power dissipate almost as fast as he was collecting it. 'This is ridiculous! I'm tiring already?' Although he hadn't bothered with much offensive magic, he had been going full-tilt trying to keep himself alive with his shields and a few desperate illusions, and adrenaline didn't work nearly as well with magic-users as it did for warriors. Kaze was not someone who had fought many long battles before, and it showed.

The holy dragon snarled, but stayed low, well-aware that there was a great deal more gunfire coming from the deck now. Instead, its tail whipped about to try and smack Kaze out of the air.

_Thwoom!_ That particular appendage wasn't so spry after a heavy railgun punched through it as if it were styrofoam, blasting shimmering skin, muscle, and warm blood out onto the deck below.

Kaze quickly levitated over behind the nearest mast, gaining some good cover as the holy dragon screamed in pain and fury. Once he was in a relatively safe position, he glanced over at the source of the increasingly loud grinding noise.

He was suitably impressed as the main launch elevator slowly rose into position, a massive, four-legged combat mecha standing atop it. Smoke wafted from the war machine's right cannon even as the laser sights on its left arm started lining up its autocannons.

Atop the shoulder of the mech, and sitting comfortably on a bank of missile launchers, June smirked at the enraged dragon, and then turned to regard Kaze. "Not bad for an evon. And a cleric, to boot. I could make use of a soldier like you... as more than a body pillow, I mean."

"Innuendo later! Shooting things now!" Kaze shouted, noting that the dragon was preparing another attack.

"SHREEEEEEEHN!!" With a feral shriek, the holy dragon spat a swirling ball of light at the combat mecha, leaving a glowing streak on the deck below as it cut a molten swath across the ship.

"Pffh. Don't even try," June snapped, raising a hand toward the projectile. "Force plane."

_BWAM!_ A powerful shock wave of superheated energy ripped apart the deck below, and both the missile and the floating shield used to detonate it collapses into a single prismatic shower of lights.

June leaned back on the mecha, giving the cockpit a light kick. "Kill it."

_Thwoom! Thwoom! Boom-boom-boom-boom-boom!_

Turning sharply away from the writhing dragon as the holy beast was ripped apart by heavy cannon fire, Kaze landed lightly onto the deck and stalked over to the massive war machine as it emptied its ammunition bays.

"Why didn't you have that thing up here in the first place? We can't fight these creatures with spells and small firearms!"

June shrugged as a volley of missiles was launched from the block launcher next to her, and waited for the barrage to end before she responded. "It wasn't feasible. We weren't expecting a concerted boarding action so quickly, and it didn't make sense to have heavy combat units here on the deck where their mobility is so limited; it's a rather expensive unit to simply turn it into an immobile defense turret."

"And I'm a rather important cleric to simply leave in the line of fire as a DISTRACTION while you get your act together!" Kaze complained, waving his staff angrily.

June stood up and hopped down as the warmech started to turn so that it could fire on the earth dragon currently engaged with most of the on-deck soldiers being led by Karen. "Oh? I was not aware of your supposed importance. I'm surprised you didn't mention it before our rendezvous earlier."

Kaze waited until the mecha released a loud barrage of cannon fire before speaking again. "If I thought being the avatar of a holy cult would have impressed you in the least, I would have brought it up," he said bluntly. "But that's not the point! You knew how resistant that thing was to magic, and you left me there to die!"

"I actually expected you to flee," June reasoned, shrugging apologetically. "You professed to being something of a coward. Why would you stand and fight something you couldn't hurt?" She trailed off at the end as another ground-shaking barrage made conversation futile, then picked up again as shell casings the size of D batteries bounced onto the deck around her. "Regardless, I am VERY impressed by your... endurance."

Kaze hesitantly shut his mouth, picking up on the subtle signs that he was on the verge of receiving a very pleasurable apology later, but really wanting to complain some more until the Israeli general got the point.

The decision was taken out of his hands as the only friendly dragon within twenty miles landed on the head of his staff. "Hey, guys? It's obvious by now that you two have a 'thing' here, but if you don't recall, there's a WAR going on over there," K snapped, pointing a wing in the direction of the earth and venom dragons. "Let's save the mushy stuff for later, lest we become mush, eh?"

June rolled her eyes, but relented immediately; her soldiers' lives were on the line too, after all. "You're right, of course. Evon, you and I will continue this discussion later... in my chambers." With a sensual wink, the woman's hands suddenly blazed with destructive light, and then she turned and walked between the legs of the warmech to help fight the remaining dragons.

K sweatdropped. "Did... Did she just refer to you as 'evon'?"

Kaze nodded, looking rather pleased now. "Yes. It's quite a step up from the slur she was addressing me by before. I think she's warming up to me!" He noticed the metadragon's incredulous stare. "I never actually told her my name. And I guess she wasn't listening when Colonel Molsk introduced us."

The dragon continued staring. "But... wait... so even though... 'warming up' to you? Didn't you-?"

"Yes," the cleric hastily replied, "though she was drunk at the time. And she hadn't had any in a LONG time."

K gaped for a few more seconds before turning away, feeling slightly dizzy. "I don't know whether to be disgusted or impressed..." then he started. "By the way, shouldn't you be helping out too? That venom dragon is fast, and Rayden is getting thrashed out there."

"I'm no good against dragons," Kaze said, echoing his earlier excuse, "especially now that I've nearly exhausted my magical power. I'll sit this one out."

K was silent for a moment. Then he smacked the evon upside the head with a metal wing. _Clang!_

"Ow! What in the-"

The metadragon lifted his head up so he could glower at the priest. "I'm not going to let you bounce on this fight after you nearly got yourself killed for that woman."

"But it's not-"

_Clang!_ K glared harder after sending another wing into the side of Kaze's skull. "No. No buts. I know that Rayden is an inept berserker that gets in over his head constantly. I know he's not a beautiful woman, and that even if he was, the chances of you making it with her would be nil." He took a deep breath. "But damn it, he's still an ally! If it were Ranma, he'd be there in a heartbeat."

Kaze winced, and hesitantly looked over the criss-cross of gunfire and energy beams that were currently exploding around the Messiah's deck. "All right, fine. But you have to come with me."

"What?"

Kaze raised an eyebrow at the suddenly wary metadragon. "As I am now, I'm good for little more than a decoy. Well, really, I'm not good for much besides that against dragons anyway, but at least I can usually put on a good light show while distracting opponents. So you'll come with me, right? Master Saotome would do it in a heartbeat."

K sweatdropped, lowering his head a bit. "... So, you're pretty much out of magic power, huh? Not much point in rushing in and getting yourself killed, I guess..."

"Smart dragon."

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

_Zslash!_ "Ssssstupid darkling!" The venom dragon hissed as his razor-sharp tail cut another gash across Rayden's chest when it SHOULD have sliced the demon knight clean in two. "Jusssst DIE!!"

Opening its jaws wide, the serpent struck, attempting to sink its long, gleaming fangs into its foe.

Blood dripped into puddles of hissing venom as Rayden swung a left hook clean into the venom dragon's lower jaw, sending the creature reeling to the side from the force. Rayden himself staggered slightly after the attack, trying to keep his balance.

His body was in tatters; blood and poison flowed in thin streams from multiple tears in his coat, and his entire face was scarred and ragged from taking a direct blast of acidic venom. His sword arm hung limply, large holes punched into his bicep even as his finger clutched Darkrune's handle tightly, unwilling to surrender its weapon. Poison surged through his body in quantities alarmingly close to that of his remaining blood; and although he didn't suffer any of the normal chemical reactions such as paralysis – thanks in no small part to the blood aura enchantment – his body had reached the absolute limit in its resistance and was now actively breaking apart from the inside. Again, that the Dread Knight could even continue standing was largely the result of his magic enhancement before battle.

The venom dragon rolled its entire body away in a sidewinder motion to minimize the impact of Rayden's blow, and then whipped its head around to face its opponent.

_Brak-ak-ak-ak-ak-ak-ak!_ Before it could get very far, it found itself being ravaged by a vulcan cannon, the stream of bullets pounding against its not-inconsiderable armor the moment it was out of melee range.

'This is no good! Where are the others?' It thought as it dashed across the deck, its body sliding over and around crates and even a few alarmed soldiers with shocking speed. 'Have our air forces been beaten back? How is that possible?'

Finding the vulcan cannon that was spitting fire at it desperately, the venom dragon lashed out with its tail, stabbing into the gun's rotating barrels in a spray of sparks and loose metal. Once the weapon ground to a halt, the dragon spat a glob of acid onto the armored bay in which the gunner was huddled and then yanked its tail out, not waiting around to hear the man's screams as flesh-melting poison slowly dripped down onto him from above.

_Braa-aap! Braa-aap!_ Several more soldiers had taken up defensive positions next to the shield generator, yet another worthy target, and had opened fire on the venom dragon from there.

The serpent hissed angrily, but hesitated. Though the machine they were protecting was obviously important, did it matter at this point? 'Can we still destroy this ship, or should we be concentrating on killing the human worm?' The dragon thought as it ducked down below a rocket barrage that tore apart the deck behind it. 'Where did he go, anyway? I can't... oh, hell.'

The venom dragon twisted considerably to avoid the dark great sword that stabbed into the deck where its body had just been.

"Where ya going, snake?" Rayden crowed, stepping up onto a crate as he slowly trudged up to the creature. "Leaving me all alone like that right after we got acquainted; it's as if you don't like me or something."

The dragon couldn't help but sweatdrop at the sight of the demon knight, obviously on the verge of keeling over, walking up to him and engaging in combat banter. "Aren't you dead yet? Jussssst lie down and perissssh already." With that, his tail whipped around to the side, slamming into Rayden and smashing him sidelong into a sensor tower.

_WHAM!_ The demon knight grunted as he felt metal crumple under his weight, followed by a pair of his ribs. Within moments, the pain faded away to a mild numbing sensation, and he pushed himself off of the tower.

The dragon snarled as it seemed the demon simply wasn't going to give up. "Fine, idiot, you brought thissss on yoursssself!"

Rayden spat out a wad of... various liquids as the serpent rushed him, its jaws opening wide in preparation to devour its foe.

The Dread Knight mumbled something unintelligible, and his eyes briefly flared a deep, blood red as wisps of darkness began to gather in his hands.

_Shlunk!_ The venom dragon seized its foe's upper torso in its jaws, lifting Rayden clean off the deck as its fangs sunk easily through the dark paladin's coat and incredibly tough flesh into the soft innards below.

Rayden did little more than grunt, the sensation of having two acidic scythes impaling his body being nothing new to him. Then he raised his shattered arms, reaching up between gleaming fangs to grip the sides of the serpent's head.

"Die..." he whispered as his leather gloves pressed against hard, black scales. "Die!" he barked as black lightning surged from the center of his punctured body down to his fingertips. "DIE!!" he shouted as the energies crackled briefly around his hands before igniting.

_BWAKOOOOM!!_ The venom dragon convulsed painfully as twin explosions threatened to split its skull right open, and it quickly drew its fangs from the dark paladin's body and reared its head back as black lightning curled around its jaws within a cloud of scalding shadow.

_SHWEEM!_ Adding insult to injury (or perhaps it was the other way around), the magi-cannon chose that particular time to snap off a shot of opportunity, plowing a light lance into the serpent's much-abused skull and smashing it into the scorched and rent surface of the main deck.

Quite confused and in a considerable amount of pain, the venom dragon's body and tail whipped about chaotically, smashing through the numerous crates and smacking painfully into the large reinforced masts that supported the roof/blast shields above.

Rayden slumped to one knee briefly, and then dragged himself to his feet, staggering over to his sword.

As if sensing the impending kill, Darkrune began to tremble and glow a dim, shadowy blue, and as the Dread Knight's hand closed around the grip, the entire blade became alive with destructive energy, arcs of black lightning surging from pommel to tip.

_Thwap!_ Rayden barely twitched as the venom dragon's tail lashed out randomly and swatted him across the back, slicing open another long stretch of flesh over the two gaping, dripping holes under his shoulder blades.

"And warrior said to the beasts: 'Follow me, pitiful creatures, and kill at my behest, rending my enemies in my name. Become my sword or feel its sting, and know your place before me,'" Rayden closed his eyes as the aura around Darkrune grew, though it was difficult for the onlookers to tell if it was in response to the strange litany or something else that wasn't as obvious. "And the beasts divided thus, turning to one another with fang and claw bared, prepared to die serving the soldier of the darkness or opposing him."

Rayden reached the dragon, grinning through a terribly scarred face at the creature's cracked skull. Batting away the creature's whipping tail almost casually, he raised his sword.

"And as battle raged, the warrior wet his blade in the flesh of serpents, staining his weapon with ancient blood, to forever prove his dominance of beasts."

His sword fell with a crackling hiss.

"SSSSSRRAAAAAAAUGH!!"

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_Wham!_ Ranma grunted as a glancing blow lacerated his ribs, slicing through skin as electric current danced across his nerves.

"Dammit, dammit, DAMMIT!" He danced backwards quickly, but the storm dragon seemed to be getting more accustomed to his movements, and recklessly charged forward while swiping relentlessly with his lightning blades.

"Hey! A little space, lizard!" Ranma growled as flames coalesced over his left hand. "DRAGON FIST!"

_BWOOM!!_ The human-form dragon was knocked clean off his feet by the impact, and sent crashing across the width of the deck, eventually plowing into the wreckage of a gun emplacement.

"Well, that'll stop him for like ten seconds," the pigtailed man muttered as he took a moment to tenderly inspect his wounds. All minor injuries, thanks to his agility and skill, though against dragons it would only take one minor slip-up to leave him dismembered and strewn across the deck.

A snarling roar came from behind him, immediately followed by a deeper, more guttural roar to his side.

Glancing to his back, he watched Rayden slump to the ground, unconscious, his sword buried deep into the venom dragon's neck. He looked like he was in horrible shape, but honestly, Ranma was seriously starting to wonder if the demon knight could be killed at all.

Glancing to his side, he watched as the rock dragon's skull was hammered by a volley of rockets and light missiles. It wasn't out of the fight yet, but it was losing badly.

When he caught sight of Karen, glowing a bright blue as mist and ice circled around her in a furious maelstrom, he knew it was over.

The sorceress thrust her arms out, causing tendrils of shimmering azure to lance outward toward her target. "ABSOLUTE ZERO!"

_CRACK!_

Growling ferociously, the storm dragon leapt to his feet as lightning sparked from his hand.

To his surprise, his target appeared to be waiting for him, standing casually with one hand resting on his hip. The other was wrapping around a rather large, gleaming pistol.

The serpent king scoffed at the thought of such a puny human weapon being used against him, and spread his hands.

Lightning lanced down from the sky in a punishing volley, and Ranma seemed to vanish behind a curtain of crackling plasma.

A few bursts of gunfire came his way, and hot blood spattered across the deck as the dragon hissed in annoyance. "Damnable humans! Out of my waUGH!" A spin kick from behind sent the dragon stumbling into another mass of crates.

Snarling, the storm dragon stood up, irritated but largely unhurt. "Is that... really the best you can do? Cheap shots and illusions? Is Dashtal's prey... truly nothing more than a trickster rogue?"

Ranma sighed as he raised his Nighthawk pistol. "Man... I really hate dragons."

The storm dragon started to get up, heedless of his target's weapon, when his sharp eyes noticed that the human wasn't aiming for him at all, but rather at something near his feet...

He twitched as he stared at the rocket ammunition that had spilled out of the crate, broken by his hardened body.

_Blam!_ The storm dragon winced reflexively... then blinked when there was no explosion following the impact.

Ranma frowned. _Blam! Blam! Ka-twang! Twing! Blam!_ The rocket warheads bounced and rolled slightly as the bullets struck their explosive heads, but did little else, completely failing to explode in a Hollywood-style fireball.

Eventually, the pigtailed warrior lowered his pistol in annoyance. "Well, damn. They must have safeties on those rockets. Whatever happened to crates full of cheap, volatile Russian surplus weapons?"

The storm dragon didn't really have an answer for that, so instead he lunged for Ranma, a ball of lightning encircling his hand.

"Yuun ram!" _WHOMP!_ A ball of ice struck the dragon in mid-charge, slamming him to the side as Karen arrived to help out her friend and lover. "BREAK!" With a sick cracking noise, the ice sphere shattered like a frag grenade, mostly breaking on the human-form dragon's skin without ill effect.

"DIE, MORTAL!!" The dragon screamed as the sphere of lightning grew larger, arcs of electricity dancing over his body.

"Mana burn," came a calm voice from behind him, before the serpent in human form was bathed in light. A sickly sizzling noise came from the serpent's hand as his magic suddenly slipped out of his hand, like a bowl that suddenly sprouted holes across its bottom.

As the dragon whirled around in confusion and steadily building dread, June Kitinski stood with her hands on her hips, a corona of power surrounding her. "Well, it seems like even the great Saotome can get in over his head on occasion. Need a hand?"

Ranma simply shrugged, much to the sorceress's annoyance. "Well, I coulda killed him myself, but I figured that since the rest of the lizards're dead, we could capture this one. Find out a thing or two about this Greken clown." He was mostly bluffing, of course – the dragon would have been more than tricky for him to take on alone – but nobody here needed to know that.

The storm dragon glanced around him incredulously. Him? A captive? They were going to take a serpent kind hostage? Just who did these piddling mortals think they were?

_Boom! Boom! Boom! Ch-chak! Click! Vvvvvwooom..._ The dragon in human form sweatdropped as he was swiftly surrounded by soldiers with their rifles at the ready, as well as a gigantic walking mech. Not to forget the nimble warrior he had been fighting earlier, and the two powerful sorceresses flanking him. Now he remembered; these piddling mortals were the ones with all the big, nasty guns, magic, armor, and thousands of individuals to all fight him at once. Not very good odds, now that he thought about it.

June snapped her fingers the moment she saw the storm dragon tense up, a bright flash emanating from her hand as she did so.

_Wham!_ The dragon cursed as he jumped up, only to smack into a plane of force and promptly fall back down.

"Colonel Molsk, you may contain this one," June said casually, wiggling her fingers as destructive energies danced between her fingers. "Make it nice and painful. It will help soften him up for the interrogation."

"Yes, General!" Karen said sharply, her hands glowing blue.

The storm dragon snarled, and his eyes flashed azure as his aura began to build. As if he'd just stand there and let himself be cap-

_Shwk!_ Ranma's blade sliced elegantly across the back of the dragon's knee, cutting a key tendon before he smashed his gauntleted hand into the back of the serpent's head, knocking him to the deck. "Easy there sparky," he said condescendingly as Karen's power began to build. "It's all over now. But look on the bright side: you get to live!"

The storm dragon turned, a spell on his lips even as tendrils of blue started to encircle him. "You will ALL peri-"

"Tomb of ice, enclose. Be silent, lizard."

_Crack!_

From across the deck, Emrey sighed wearily and looked out over the Messiah's topdeck bleakly.

"So... it's over, then. Finally." Plumes of smoke wafted from half of the hovercraft's vulcan cannon turrets, while three others besides had been either ripped to shreds or, in one particularly ugly case, corroded horribly by poisonous acid.

No less that five great, scaly corpses were strewn across the dreadnaught's deck, not including the storm dragon that was currently having its frozen prison reinforced with a force cage in preparation for transport.

The rakshasa holstered his weapons wearily. Not that he had done much serious fighting himself; his abilities were useless against dragons, and he wasn't suited to front-line combat anyway. Emrey had spent the entire battle sniffing out those spawnlings from the swamp dragon that had managed to skitter off into small , hidden places and killing the vile things. It was a rather petty contribution, but an essential one.

Or at least, that's what he told himself as he walked toward the entry corridor the led into the ship. Entering the key code that unlocked the blast doors, he sighed as the heavy shielded barriers slowly started opening. 'Those creatures were vicious and rather opportunistic. An infestation of them could... have... uhm...'

The rakshasa gulped as he stared at the horrific scene in the entry corridor. Long streaks of dark blood and thick ichor decorated the walls in wild arcs and splashes, having barely dried. The dismembered and gutted bodies of spawnlings lay strewn about, along with a great number of blades and a few charred streaks where it looked like fire had raked the floor.

"Lieutenant," June snapped, coming up behind the stalled rakshasa, "we have wounded coming through. Move yo-" she stopped mid-word as the demon stepped aside, revealing the carnage-soaked interior. "What? What are..." She frowned deeply.

Ranma approached from behind, dragging Rayden along by his feet. "Like I said, I had stuff to take care of. The bug managed to get one of those sacs next to the main entrance. Damn thing was full of those little crawlers."

He passed by June and Emrey, leaving a great streak of blood and other dark, brackish fluids trailing from Rayden. Kaze passed by immediately afterward, mumbling to himself.

"Hmmm... no, I don't think 'slow poison' is going to do it here. Is there a spell like 'empty bloodstream'? I'll have to look it up..."

Emrey's eyebrow twitched as he watched the trio go.

Behind him, June rubbed her forehead anxiously. "Those people are terrifying in so many different ways..."

The rakshasa could only nod mutely in response.

End Chapter 13


	14. Seriously, What are Friends For?

Profile Report: Test subject 18 - Project Magi Excelsius

Name: Ranma Saotome

Organizational Status: Mercenary unit, class S

Nationality: Japanese

Age: 16 years (estimate)

Physical status: Critical as of 7/13/2002

Mental status: Stable

Subject background: Ranma Saotome's background is not extensively known, as he has had little long-term contact with civilization and thus has no proper civilian or military records outside of these very documents. That said, he has shown little reluctance to answer queries about his past and has been extremely cooperative with our engineering and research teams. Some have accused him of fabricating many of the stories about his past, if only because they seem entirely impossible, but then again, recent events have dramatically changed what is to be considered "impossible".  
Born within Japan, Saotome underwent strenuous high-level close-combat training at an early age under the instruction of his father, which included harsh and at times deadly survivalist training. During the demon outbreak at the beginning of the Death March, his father was killed, but Saotome managed to survive long enough to make contact with human forces. Since then his allegiances have mostly been brief and chaotic, but what few reports there are of his services outside of what we've observed have placed him as being competent and trustworthy, and he has done nothing to challenge that while under Israel's employment.  
Ranma Saotome boasts physical capabilities far beyond the norm of ordinary humans, including our most elite commandos; he can effectively dodge rifle fire, survive incredible levels of force, and impacts from his punches and kicks have been seen to break through steel. These and other abilities he refuses to classify as magic, claiming that they belong to school of physical combat and utilize something called "ki". This claim has not been investigated.  
As of the time of his volunteering for Project Magi Excelsius, Saotome had served on forty-one missions under various commands. He had sustained seventeen minor injuries in action, two major injuries that were corrected via new medical techniques (healing magic), and refused three separate offers to enlist properly into the Israeli armed forces at an inflated pay grade. Beyond this, his combat record, including his kill count, deals with some sensitive operations and has been classified. It can be divulged, however, that his specialization seemed to be assassination, although Saotome did not advertise this fact.

Project background: At the time of testing, Project Magi Excelsius was entering the testing phase for series 42 of its engineering designs, discarding the previous experiment series 40 - despite its considerable success with subject Karen Molsk - and the series 41 design, which head researcher Harmon stated was nothing but a "polished version of series 40." His engineering team, led by Bernan von Harret, proposed a radically different approach to the problem of aligning mana transmission with spell formation: by using new crystal matrix technologies, which had shown superior ability to absorb and replicate spell patterns, he had hoped to use the human soldier as a mere trigger and power source, installing a complete spellcasting apparatus that would perform all the dangerous, difficult, and distracting actions of spellcasting with but a mental command from the vessel and a bit of attention toward aiming. After completing a working apparatus that functioned effectively when linked to a small-scale mana reactor, Harret proclaimed that the system was ready for human testing.

Experiment 801-ME-42: (From Bernan von Harret's notes) "Due to the larger and more extensive casting apparatus that must be installed within the human body, it was decided that a superior physical specimen would be necessary to recover from the extensive surgery that would be required in the implant process. After perusing the selection of candidates, a colleague of mine asked for my assistance with a unique case in which he was chosen to study the physical enigma of a certain mercenary whom the recruiting staff were certain was not human. While I wasn't much help to my colleague, the brief encounter was very helpful to me, and I immediately went about acquiring the young man as a test subject. It was not easy, as he seemed reluctant, and my superiors were absolutely against the idea of possibly granting our most powerful technological breakthroughs to a mercenary. Over time, however, I convinced the mercenary - a Japanese boy named Ranma Saotome - to cooperate by assuring him that the risks were negligible, and I then convinced my superiors - ironically - that the risks were considerable, and thus it was in our best interests to perform testing on a mercenary rather than any Israeli citizens. Although I understand the concerns of my superiors, they are not a priority for me; what Saotome does with the power he will soon receive is none of my concern, and if the project does succeed and he foolishly turns his new power against Israel, my work will ensure that we will have dozens, if not hundreds, of equally capable magi-soldiers to counter him. This project is about the progression of scientific knowledge and control of magic, as well as the military supremacy of Israel in a besieged Middle East. I will not allow such petty fears to stop my work."

Experiment 801-ME-42: (Continued) Installation of the ME-42 casting apparatus into a human subject, followed by activation of the apparatus, and eventually combat testing. Surgery scheduled at 800 hours Tuesday, 7/12/2002 and estimated to take until 2000 hours the same day. System activation will begin the following day. Subject testing and training will begin ten days after activation, to allow for recovery from the surgery. Combat training date is pending...

Progression: Surgery was completed at 1800 hours Tuesday evening, without any unanticipated complications. The subject's vitals remained strong, with the only concern raised being his abnormal resistance to the sedatives used in the procedure and his alarmingly rapid recovery from their effects. Nonetheless, Harret had anticipated this possibility and corrective actions were taken before problems arose.

Incident: (From Bernan von Harret's notes) "The moment we turned on the blasted apparatus, everything went to hell. Granted, it was a very passive, contained kind of hell, as I imagine mistakes in these types of experiments can cause everything from sudden explosions to spontaneous indoor lightning storms, but nonetheless it was a complete disaster. I'm still not sure why, but the crystals immediately started absorbing mana from Saotome's body at an accelerated rate, despite not yet being called upon to cast anything. This was both confusing and fascinating, as for some time we were not aware that Saotome was actually in danger; the effects of having one's magical energies drained completely from a human body is a completely unique scenario to me and my staff. We tried to deactivate the complex, but it was like trying to turn off a river without the tools or time necessary to construct a dam; the mana flow just wouldn't stop, even as the subject started weakening. We started tossing around ways of cutting off the flow or removing a critical part so that the apparatus would no longer be capable of tapping into him as a mana source, but we were far too late. After a mere two minutes, his vitals flatlined, and his mana resonance hit zero before the apparatus failed, permanently losing function. Although I had prepared myself for the possibility of failure, this disaster struck me like a hammer; unless I can isolate an obvious and completely removable flaw in the design, it will have to be scrapped completely, and we'll have to start over with older technologies. In addition, I fear that I've inadvertently destroyed a valuable military asset to Israel; though I doubt the generals will shed any tears over this mercenary, I know one young woman personally who I expect will take his passing very poorly."

Incident + 0.6 hours: (From Bernan von Harret's notes) "We've completed our preliminary investigation into the failure of the apparatus previous to our dissection of the corpse and recovery of the device. What we've found is very unusual: Saotome's body has become a magical void; an area of mass completely devoid of mana particles and energies. Not only did the apparatus drain his immediate energies, and seemingly destroy whatever supposed mechanism the human body has for attracting and maintaining a mana level critical for survival, but the crystals have reduced his biomass to a natural magical null zone. For the uninformed reader of these notes, this is extremely bizarre, and these conditions can rarely be formed artificially, much less naturally. Inside an atmosphere - or at least inside Earth's atmosphere - mana is similar to radiation, in which even the very air carries low levels of magical energy, and areas in which there is absolutely none simply do not exist within the atmosphere. One of the unique qualities of magical energy is that it tends to gather very unequally in even a small amount of space, usually gathering around solid mass and especially biomass. A mana resonance of zero should be impossible, especially in a living creature. Or in this case, a fomerly living creature. Apart from the scientific anomaly this represents, of course, it has also resulted in catastrophic loss of body function in Saotome. It's as if every organ in his body simply quit. Still, that this accident somehow not only created, but sustained-" (This entry ends here)

Incident + 0.65 hours: (From Bernan von Harret's notes) "I have no idea how this happened, but apparently our staff went the extra mile to resuscitate Saotome despite his being far beyond clinically dead. I really have no idea what to make of this at all, but if I had to hazard a guess without any regard for whatever scientific principles are in play here, it almost seemed as if he crawled back from death out of sheer force of will. I say this because the bizarre magical null space has not abated; from what little we know of absolute mana drain, he should be dead. Absolutely, positively, too-deceased-to-even-rise-as-a-zombie dead. But... he's not. Still, while he is still unconscious, it was decided that he would immediately be moved back into surgery to have the apparatus removed. It's no use to him now, and now that the experiment has failed, the survival of the subject is our top priority. We're officially going 'back to the drawing board' on this one."

Israeli Military Research data file N-08199

Nexus II  
by Black Dragon  
/anime5/fanficlair

Disclaimer: Damn near everything belongs to me 'cept Ranma.

Words in " " are presented phonetically, or is the primary language in a scene (usually English, in this case). " " is spoken in a different language than the norm. Sounds are italicized, and writing is now presented in + +.

Chapter 14  
Seriously, What are Friends For?

* * *

"You sure you're okay, man?" Asked the man at the head of the table, looking uneasy as Rayden sat down heavily at the other end.

The demon knight didn't look too bad from the neck down, if only because he had replaced his trench coat yet again and had every inch of his body covered. His face, on the other hand, was a vile patchwork of ragged scars caused by the virulent poisons that had struck him. Only one of his eyes - dark and bloodshot - was visible, while the other was covered by a torn rag that was tied around his head.

Suffice to say, he looked like he should have been resting in the intensive care ward, or been awaiting surgery. Certainly not playing cards with the marines.

"Yeah, I'm fine," the Dread Knight said casually as he flicked a few coins into the pot, "deal me in."

The soldiers glanced at each other in concern.

"Do you know how to play?" One man asked.

"If I don't, then I'm about to make you all rich men, aren't I?" Rayden responded, starting to get annoyed.

The marines were about to relent, not wishing to unnecessarily antagonize the demon hunter, when a metallic dragon flew into the room, startling several of the men and adding another layer of strangeness to the scenario.

"This is so lame," K groused as he alighted on Rayden's shoulder, ignoring the looks from the soldiers. He had been getting a lot more attention ever since the battle against the dragon army, though thankfully, he was too small and harmless-looking to cause too much alarm.

"If you're bored, then barf up some precious metals and play some cards," Rayden suggested flippantly as one marine hesitantly began dealing.

"I can't spit up the things I eat, you dimwit," the metadragon mumbled.

"Then your entire species is truly worthless," Rayden responded as he picked up his cards, his one visible eye narrowing.

K scowled, wishing not for the first time that he knew what Rayden was so that he could make similarly insulting generalizations about his species.

As the first round of betting began, one marine gathered his courage and decided to try breaking into the little spat that the only two non-humans in the group were having. "So, you know any of the monsters we shot up yesterday?"

K blinked in surprise at the question. "Oh, no, not at all. I've actually had very little contact with other dragons during my life."

"Really? Why not?" The man asked, tossing his cards down to show that he folded. "Don't dragons raise their young?"

"Most of them, I guess," K mumbled, feeling a bit uncomfortable with the personal nature of the questions. He hadn't even discussed his origins or his young life with any of his teammates yet.

Though to be fair, this was because none of them were even remotely interested. It amazed K sometimes that their little band maintained such a level of mutual trust and respect when they knew so little about each others' backgrounds.

"So you weren't raised by a mama dragon?" another marine asked with a smirk.

"No... uh..." K hesitated for a moment, noting that he now had the full attention of everyone at the table, and quite a few others at the other tables as well.

Well, everyone at the table except the very person he was perched on. Rayden was completely focused on the cards in his hand.

"My egg was actually captured by dark elf poachers," K explained awkwardly. "When I was little - well, more little, I suppose - I was sold to a demon lord in Juniya, but his castle was overrun by a werewolf tribe and I was sold back onto the market as an 'exotic pet'."

"Damn, that sounds rough. Raise."

"Well, it wasn't ideal, but I wasn't treated that badly," the little dragon reasoned, "heck, in most areas in the realm, being fed and cared for your entire life is a pretty sweet deal. I certainly don't like my chances trying to fend for myself."

_Bam!_ Rayden slammed his hand down on the table, revealing two jacks that proved a perfect addition to the other jack among the cards in the middle of the table. As the men groaned, the demonic knight grabbed a coin from the pot and tapped it against K's nose.

"Here ya go. Keep yapping and distract them from the game; it's working great."

A vein popped up on K's head, but he reluctantly bit into the coin before snapping it up entirely; he wasn't about to give up good silver.

"And what about you, big guy? What's your story?" A corporal asked as he started gathering the cards for his turn to deal.

"What do you care?" Rayden asked as he tapped another coin impatiently against the surface of the table. "I'm just another bloodthirsty demon that happens to like killing other bloodthirsty demons rather than all of you. Nothing special."

"Actually, around these parts, that is kinda special," the corporal said dryly as he started passing out the cards. "Everyone else has a story. The shifter, fangs, the beetles..."

Rayden sweatdropped as he picked up his cards. "You call the jugas 'the beetles'?"

"Mostly 'cause we're still taking bets on how long it'll take the general to get fed up and crush 'em like bugs," another marine piped up, shrugging.

"Anyway, they're all fighting alongside humans because something happened to drag them into the IEF, not because they thought it was a good idea," the corporal explained as he gestured for Rayden to bet.

The demon knight started to roll his eyes, but K suddenly spoke up. "You know, I'm kind of curious myself... you're a dark paladin belonging to one of the most infamous dark cults who just happens to be wandering around getting into fights at random... shouldn't you be part of a crusade or something? Or are you on some sort of quest?"

Rayden's eye twitched. "I don't really want to talk about it. Check."

_Clang!_ The marines winced as the metadragon smacked the demon knight in the cheek with a wing. "Stop being a baby and spill it, you brat. I told you my story."

"Did you? I wasn't listening," Rayden grumbled, trying to concentrate on his cards.

"Hey, hey, let's take it easy," a different soldier said nervously, "if he doesn't wanna say, then it's none of our business, right? He spilled his share of blood yesterday, he's cool with us."

"S'not that, I was just hoping for a story," the corporal said evenly as he flipped a pair of coins into the pot. "Not trying to pry, but you seem like the type that has a lot to talk about."

"I prefer stabbing things to talking, really," Rayden said as he put two coins in. Then he flipped over a card. "Pair o' tens."

The corporal turned over his cards. "Pair o' aces. This round's mine."

Rayden grunted and pushed the pile of money forward.

As the marine gathered up his winnings, he smirked at the metadragon sulking on Rayden's shoulder. "Hey, buck up there, little guy! We're not bad company, are we?"

"Nah, it's not that..." K hedged.

"Then what's your problem?" Rayden asked in annoyance. "You're starting to bug me."

"Hmph," the metadragon pouted. "I was just wondering why I had to get stuck hanging out with you, that's all."

Rayden picked up his new hand as the next round began. "Well, that's simple: it's because Ranma and Kaze are off getting laid."

One of the marines spit out his drink as the others started chuckling.

"Gee, thanks, I feel SO much better about having to hang around with a mutilated death machine now," the tiny dragon deadpanned.

"Anytime, shrimp," the Dread Knight said casually before tossing his cards in. "Fold."

* * *

"Once again, thank you all for coming to this tactical debriefing. I know that our duties have been hectic since the battle yesterday and that you all probably have more important things to be doing," Colonel Nemo stood at the head of the conference room, a bandage around his arm where he had been cut by a stray crystal fragment fighting the rock dragon. "Nonetheless, it's important that certain aspects of the battle yesterday - now referred to as Conflict Draconis in the archives - be observed and addressed."

The colonel spent a moment looking at the various men and women seated in the room, nodding to a select few.

"First, let me offer my congratulations to Commander Addler for his exemplary performance in yesterday's combat sortie. Thanks to his expert command, we were able to establish air superiority far earlier than we had hoped and cut off two of the three attempted enemy retreats with low casualties. You and your men can expect a few medals going your way in the following weeks."

There was some pleased murmuring among the named commander and a few pilots who had shown up, along with a few quiet statements of encouragement from the others gathered in the room.

"That said, every other team we had operating yesterday did an excellent job. We faced an opposing force greater than our own in sheer power, and crushed the offensive with only light damage to the Messiah, four aircraft lost, and a grand total of thirty-two men dead, fourteen wounded. Our gunnery teams showed particular courage under the enemy assault, and sustained the most grievous casualties. Yesterday many fine men met painful and horrific ends in the line of duty, and will be honored as the heroes they are."

Many of the assembled soldiers nodded grimly as the entire room fell silent for a few seconds.

"Finally, the captain asked me to extend a special thank-you to Lieutenant Emrey... who, I'm rather surprised to see, is actually here today," Colonel Nemo said with a raised eyebrow.

He wasn't the only one surprised, which was apparent from the number of curious glances and uneasy muttering toward the rear corner of the room, where the rakshasa assassin was sitting and fuming silently.

"Your timely warning of the incoming enemy flight gave our combat crews valuable minutes of preparation time before the assault began, and may have saved numerous lives," Nemo explained to the skeptical audience.

"It was my pleasure," the demon deadpanned, clearly annoyed with having to be in the room. He was only there because Karen had asked - and then, once he'd refused, ordered - him to go in her place and take notes for her to peruse later.

Why? He could only think of one reason why Colonel Molsk would skip a debriefing after a major battle. An annoying, well-armed, pigtailed reason that was even now probably shaking the Messiah's superstructure as it performed heinous, deviant, and wonderfully pleasurable acts on his dream girl.

Shawn Nemo couldn't imagine why the rakshasa suddenly looked so glum after being recognized for his good work, but decided to move on. "I was also asked by several of the engineers and a few marines to extend their thanks to the mercenary units that were caught in the battle, particularly one... ah..." looking a bit flustered, the colonel leafed through his notepad rapidly. "Oh. One 'Ranma Sata-Sao? Saotome. Yes, Ranma Saotome. Uh... is he here?"

Emrey's eyebrow twitched as people started mumbling and glancing all about.

"I guess he wouldn't have much reason to attend the debriefing anyway," Shawn said, shrugging. "In any case, Saotome, along with his small company, displayed remarkable bravery during the enemy's boarding action, destroying numerous infiltrators and engaging the dragons on the main deck. His assistance, and that of... uh..." frowning at the other names in his notes, the colonel eventually just tore the page out and tossed it to the side. "His assistance, and that of his lackeys proved invaluable during the defensive, and our superiors offer their deepest thanks for the unsolicited help. They risked their lives for our sakes, and without any promise of compensation."

Emrey was actively gnashing his teeth now as he started imagining all sorts of unorthodox "compensation" that Ranma was probably getting for his trouble.

"Unless there are any further comments or questions, I will now begin the debriefing."

A hologram flickered into view behind the magi-soldier, showing an image of eastern Asia with the Messiah represented by a bright, gleaming star.

"As many of you are aware, at 1800 hours yesterday, a junker skiff made enemy contact and had their communications cut off as they attempted to escape an extremely unfavorable encounter with an omega-class warbeast. Thanks to a brilliant ruse by Sergeant Garron, the crew and its escort escaped with only minor injuries. They were then able to transmit crucial data on the incoming enemy forces." The map display showed the crash site that the junker had been investigating, and then marked the attacking dragon with a stylized western dragon emblem.

The hologram flickered once more, and then the map changed to show small thumbnail images of each of the dragons that had attacked the Messiah.

"The entire force consisted of seventeen adult dragons; thirteen flyers, two flightless, and two subterraneans." There were a few impressed whistles before Shawn continued. "For those of you who are somehow not aware, this is a TREMENDOUS amount of force to deploy at once against a single target. Many would consider it overkill, even against a target as big and well-defended as the Messiah. To be sure, it was only with advanced deployment, firepower dispersion, and tactics that we were able to survive, never mind crush the attack completely."

One individual raised his hand. "Do we know what the enemy objective was? Why did they attack us?"

The colonel nodded. "We're currently unsure of the enemy's reasoning behind the assault, though it's not very difficult to guess; the IEF has been a constant thorn in the side of the local demon lords and nests, and there are a great many who would appreciate, and finance, our elimination. The real question is where all these dragons CAME from, and what kind of leader could force them into a coherent army. As some of you are aware, dragons are highly territorial, proud, and quarrelsome among their own kind. It's supposedly very difficult to manage a force that contains even a few dragons due to the constant power struggles and disputes over war spoils. What kind of power could command a force of that many dragons toward a single objective, never mind acquire such a force in the first place? We're researching the question, and our prisoner from the conflict is awaiting interrogation once we prepare a properly fortified chamber. Whoever ordered this attack on the IEF - assuming it wasn't one of the enemy dragons in the first place - is extremely dangerous if it is able to launch such a huge offensive without warning or any obvious reason. As unlikely as it is that the enemy has any significant resources remaining after such an assault, we cannot discount the possibility that it has assets matching or exceeding the force encountered yesterday in reserve."

"Don't you think that's a little ridiculous?" A lieutenant asked as she raised her hand. "A collection of more than thirty dragons would take a tremendous amount of food to maintain, to say nothing of their 'other needs'."

"Granted. However, feeding thirty isn't a terrible stretch beyond feeding seventeen, which are both less of a stretch than some demon lord with a grudge finding seventeen dragons all at once who are willing to band together and attack a treasureless floating battleship. Feeding a population of dragons would be a challenge, but is more than possible. Keeping them in order should be the impossible part... but it would seem that someone has overcome those difficulties."

The hologram changed once again to show an image of the Messiah, and several red circles rapidly approaching it.

"This is a bird-eye tactical map showing the combat progression in real time. We struck a decisive blow right away by eliminating the largest of the enemy units and dispersing their attack formation."

Several lights came from the sandship's position, representing the first volley, and the red circles immediately became disoriented, wobbling in the air and in one case running into each other. The biggest circle continued advancing, but then suddenly stopped. Several seconds later, it vanished.

"Here was the beginning of the dragons' attack run. Our shields absorbed catastrophic levels of energy, but thanks to the staggered timing of the enemies' attacks and their broken spearhead, the Messiah's shields remained functional at all times."

Several blue circles appeared on the edge of the hologram, and swiftly started moving toward the swirling combat around the hovercraft.

"At this point, our fighter/bombers engaged the enemy. Despite a difficult dogfight and considerable risk of friendly fire, our aircraft took the upper hand. You can see that the enemy was unable to sustain combat against a mobile foe combined with stationary fire bases and the sheer assortment of incoming weaponry inevitably overcame the dragons' various defenses. Thankfully, the enemy lost all remaining tactical coherency at this point; several dragons attempted to retreat, while others either forced their way onto the Messiah or continued attacking it desperately, ignoring our aircraft."

Suddenly the hologram zoomed in so that the sandship filled the entire image.

"This is where we had trouble. In general we do not consider boarding actions a feasible tactic due to our marine complement and firepower; however, the dragons boasted the mobility to reach the Messiah combined with the resilience to fend off our soldiers once they boarded. Luckily for us, most of them didn't think of this either; if we'd had the entire attack force under our shields instead of buzzing around outside where our fighters and guns could engage them, victory would have been unlikely at best. Our technicians are considering the possibility of utilizing 'hard shields' to prevent the enemy from slipping through, but this is an unlikely solution, and completely moot if the Messiah's shields fall before being boarded. The simple truth is that we lack truly effective defensive combat strength in such close quarters."

"Well, what are we supposed to do about that? Humans are no match for demons in melee. 'Specially not serpent kings." Muttered one captain.

"You'd think so, huh?" Mumbled a marine, thinking back to when he'd seen the pigtailed stranger clashing with the swamp dragon. He wasn't sure if the guy was really human or not, but he sure looked like it.

"There are three ways to address the problem that have been proposed by a brief discussion on the topic with Colonel Zarret: one is to develop a new mech design specifically for quick-deployment and close-quarters combat. Or we could copy the Americans' methods and attempt to purchase from them their autonomous close-combat droids. Finally, the Japanese Empire hires and trains demons as close-combat shock troops..."

The response to the last proposal ranged from raised eyebrows to disgusted grunts; the IEF, out of all the modern armies of the world, was by far the most insular, and though they occasionally made use of mercenaries and accepted that not all non-humans were enemies of mankind, many would have guessed otherwise after having dealt with its leadership. To be sure, hiring outsiders was frowned upon by Central Command in Jerusalem, and Karen Molsk's enlistment of demons was considered outrageous by most.

Shawn cleared his throat to cut off the discontented whispering. "All three are viable options, and though the first makes the best use of our current technologies and combat strategies, the third would be the most cost-effective and save a whole slew of engineering difficulties. Also, I'm sure some of you witnessed one of the mercenary units fighting on the main deck. Such force would be a valuable asset."

One marine snorted. "I saw that force getting smacked around like a rag doll half the time. If the magi-cannon hadn't nailed that snake, he would've been toast."

"He did kill it, though," another soldier mused. "And it WAS a dragon. That's gotta count for something."

"The kid with the pigtail killed a dragon, too. And he did it without bleeding all over the damn decks."

"Okay, that's enough," Colonel Nemo said firmly, holding up his arms. "There are a lot of arguments to be made from all sides on the issue, but it's a tactical angle we should consider. Most, if not all, of you are aware that Colonel Molsk keeps a bodyguard retinue that consists entirely of demons, and she has utilized them with great success. General Kitinski, do you have any thoughts on the matter?"

The room fell silent, and several members of the audience started looking around.

"General?" Shawn blinked in surprise as he searched around the room and realized that he couldn't find the silver-haired woman. He was a bit embarrassed by this fact, as June Kitinski stood out a great deal from her soldiers, but the simple fact was that he had automatically assumed she was there. June attended EVERY tactical meeting. Besides the fact that it was pretty much her job, she rarely had better things to do.

'Why wouldn't she be here? There was certainly no mistake in the time of meeting... she would have been given clear notification of the debriefing, and she didn't sustain any injuries... what could she be doing that's more important than analyzing the tactical aspects of a major battle?'

* * *

"-and I get knocked down, but I get up again, and they're never gonna keep me down! I get knocked down, but I get up again, and they're never gonna keep me down!"

As she dabbed some soap on a wash cloth, June began humming awkwardly over the steaming hiss of her shower head, having forgotten the next few lines to the song, but not wanting to skip right into another chorus.

"Hmmm-hmmm hmmm! Oh, I get knocked down, but I-GAAAH!"

The IEF general screamed and flinched back as the water's temperature dropped about forty degrees almost instantly, and quickly grabbed the cold water valve before shutting it.

"What in the hell..." she mumbled a curse in Hebrew as she inspected the handle to the valve, trying to figure out the cause of the sudden change in temperature.

A sliding noise behind her offered a possible answer, and her eyes narrowed as Kaze - completely naked, as one would expect of someone taking a shower - entered the stall.

"Was that you who just did that?" June asked heatedly, planting her hands on her hips.

"Yes, of course," Kaze mumbled, looking half-asleep as he gestured to the soap sitting on the sill under the shower head. It promptly lifted up off the platform and floated through the air into his hand.

June's eye twitched. "Well, why did you do that?"

The evon cleric took the soap out of the air once it was close and then yawned before responding. "Because your taste in music is sub-par, and your singing voice is flat-out terrible."

"I don't remember asking for your opinion OR your company, clown." June deadpanned.

"Healing, divinations, unsolicited criticism, and casual intercourse are but a few of the services I offer, all free of charge. No returns, offer is void on weekends. Sorry, no CODs," Kaze said lazily as he started scrubbing himself, clearly not intending to leave or stop annoying the sorceress.

June sighed as she let her arms drop, and turned again to fine-tune the water valves to an ideal temperature. "Are you STILL upset about me leaving you to fight that dragon?"

"Oh, no, I'm completely over that," Kaze said earnestly as he snapped his fingers, causing the shower head to move to a higher angle and spray water directly onto his chest. "This is simply my regular personality. You'll find it emerges from time to time when I'm not trying to have sex with you."

June checked the temperature and then reached up to change the angle of the shower head back to what it was before. "Of course. Every silver lining is attached to a dark cloud, after all," she said bluntly. "As long as you're here and you won't go away, make yourself useful and wash my hair."

Kaze frowned. "Don't wanna," he said simply, pointing to the shower head and causing it to change angles again.

June frowned back at him. Then she pointed her index finger at his foot.

_Zap!_ "YOW!" The evon jumped as a spark of light seared his toes, and started hopping about in pain. "What was that about?!"

The silver-haired sorceress calmly re-adjusted the shower head as Kaze quickly healed the minor burn. "Don't act so surprised, you dope. I'm a military woman. Using force to get what I want is second nature to me." She turned around and glared at the evon. "So, for future reference, whenever we're both naked, you do what I say. Otherwise, you get shocked."

Kaze's eyes narrowed.

"OR, if you really piss me off," June continued, "I'll put my clothes back on."

"I'm not sure what's worse," Kaze mumbled as June's shampoo floated from the rack below the shower head and into his hand, "that you consider violence a less serious threat than celibacy, or that I agree with the sentiment."

"Yeah, we make a perfect couple," the general said dryly. "Now stop yapping and start scrubbing."

* * *

It was only a slightly different scenario that saw Ranma a mere six rooms down the hall, sitting upright in Karen's bed as the sound of the running shower permeated from the bathroom.

He was currently toying with the chains that Kaze had taken from one of the bandit leaders, and thinking about what the cleric had said about the juga using it.

Ranma had always had trouble using certain magic weapons and items due to his unique status as being magically inert, but considering that the juga were themselves a magically inept race, chances were good that this wasn't one of those items.

"Hyah!" He threw the bladed head of the weapon out, and then immediately tugged sharply on the chain, snapping the weapon back to his hand before he caught it firmly out of the air.

_Crash!_ The pigtailed man winced as the ceiling lamp fell down, apparently having been severed from the ceiling on the return trip.

"Huh... flies pretty straight for a chain... which isn't necessarily a good thing." He dangled the weapon's head, which was a symmetrical collection of four inwardly-curved blades melded onto the end of the chain, giving it the look of a grappling claw.

With a little practice, the chain could become an effective weapon... or he could sell it and hopefully buy something else that was already an effective weapon; either way, at the rate K was devouring his gear, he needed to get something else besides the usual stock of knives and blades that he normally kept on his person. After the loss of his staff and a bit of his not-COMPLETELY-useless sword, he was starting to get worried. Good a knife-fighter as he was, Ranma did not want to face a dragon without a main weapon. Preferably a main weapon that was ultra-sharp, extremely durable, and didn't look like he'd fished it out of the river.

He glanced over at the pistol on the nightstand, next to his gauntlet and some other articles of clothing that Ranma had managed to remove before Karen had gotten impatient and finished the job.

Although the IEF would be only too happy to give him access to their armories, there was little he wanted from them except good ammunition; the IEF did not make effective melee weapons. There was no point to it. The average human soldier that got dragged into a melee died before they even drew their close-combat weapons, so giving them an extra-special knife or sword simply served to deliver that weapon to an enemy that would actually use it. Humans favored guns for a reason.

"What're you thinking about?" Came Karen's voice from behind. "How to fix my lamp, hopefully?"

Ranma chuckled nervously as he turned his head. "Heh heh... uh... sorry about that. Dunno what went wrong there."

Karen sauntered over to him, nothing but a towel around her waist covering any part of her. "Don't give me that, you shouldn't be playing with weapons in my room," she chastised him, climbing onto the bed and poking Ranma in the nose.

"Well, whenever I try to leave to go train, you drag me back in here," Ranma said bluntly as he fell backward onto the pillow.

Karen smirked and tossed the towel aside, sidling up next to her lover. "Oh, hush. This is going to be the last time I see you for quite some time, and I want to enjoy it. You can play with your silly knives any time."

Ranma wrapped his arms around the sorceress as she cuddled against his side, enjoying the soft warmth of her body pressed against his own.

"... I wonder who'd win in a fight, you or Kaze?"

Karen sweatdropped. "You really know how to kill the mood, you know that?"

"If I didn't, then I'd just end up having sex all the time, and I'd never get **anything** done," Ranma said playfully, kissing her on the forehead.

"Right. You have it so rough," Karen deadpanned. "Anyway, I've never seen him fight, so I couldn't say... though traditionally, clerics don't measure up to sorcerers. Especially sorcerers with guns and extensive combat training."

"Right, right..." Ranma mumbled, rubbing his chin. "What about Rayden? Do you think you can take Rayden?"

Karen rolled her eyes. "That's enough out of you," she said, pushing herself up and then straddling him before grinning widely. "I have two hours before the next strategy meeting... why don't you keep me 'entertained' until then, hm?"

With a small smile, Ranma reached up and then brushed a lock of her still-damp hair away from her face.

_Krsht! Colonel Molsk, this is Captain Gretzky. I'm just contacting you to let you know that General Kitinski has requested a meeting with you immediately to have a strategic discussion before the general meeting._

Ranma sweatdropped as a swath of blue energy floated around Karen's forearm, which was pointed directly at the wall-mounted speaker above her nightstand. "Hey, hey, now... take it easy. This IS your job." He squeezed her shoulder comfortingly as the young woman scowled.

"Damn it..." Karen mumbled as she let the energies dissipate, letting heat swiftly seep back into her fingers. Then she looked thoughtful and looked back down at the lithe, muscular body pinned under her legs. "You know, maybe I'm still in the shower after all."

Ranma blinked. "Huh? No you're not."

The voluptuous soldier smiled broadly before she leaned down and kissed Ranma hungrily, her arms wrapping around his neck as their lips met.

After a good ten seconds, she broke the kiss, leaving Ranma gasping for air briefly.

"Oh... so THAT'S what you meant."

Karen was just starting to re-position herself on top of her lover when the speaker crackled to life again, causing another surge of frustration.

_Uh... this is Gretzky again..._ The voice sounded rather nervous this time, which Ranma wouldn't have found surprising at all if the man speaking could have actually seen the death gaze Karen was currently trying to give him through the speaker. _General Kitiniski says that she knows you're in there, so get dressed and get moving._

There was a moment of near-silence as some muted noises came from the speaker, as if the captain was whispering with someone next to him. _Also, the general wanted me to tell Ranma Saotome that his lackeys are building up a bar tab that he needs to pay off... er, if he's there, I mean! Which I'm certainly not insinuating he is!_

Ranma sighed as Karen stalked off to her closet, already sulking. "Well, if you're gonna be busy, I'd better go beat up Ray until he pays his bill."

"Hmph. Must be nice not having to answer to anyone else," Karen mumbled as she slipped her panties on.

"Not really. I'd love to be able to pass the buck every once and while with these guys," Ranma said as he pulled up his pants. "Being in charge of Rayden and K is kind of like being a babysitter, except no one pays me."

"Huh... what about the other one?"

Ranma stopped to think about that briefly as he fastened his belt. "Kaze... seems alright. Most of the time. He seems a lot smarter and more mature, and that's really the important thing. I don't feel like I need to watch him all the time, or he's going to do something stupid."

* * *

"Why, Kaze? Why do you do this to me?" Ranma mumbled as the evon sweatdropped.

Kaze was currently squatting on the top deck on top of a colored blanket with several weapons, items, and a few of Rayden's mysterious tand coins spread out in front of him.

"Why, Master Saotome, I have no idea what you mean," the priest said with a perfectly straight face. "I'm merely trying to sell our excess inventory for traveling funds. This is a normal activity for adventurers, is it not?"

Ranma looked down at the signs posted in front of each item. "'Magical luck charms'? Those are Ray's worthless evil cult coins."

"FIRST of all, they have some innate value from the metals and stones they're made from," Kaze pointed out. "And SECOND of all... so what? Evil cult coins can be good luck charms. Everything on that sign is completely, absolutely, subjectively true."

Ranma looked over at the sign again. "So... did you magically enchant them with luck, or something?"

"Enchant them with 'luck'? Of course not. That's stupid. I magically made them shinier."

Ranma crossed his arms over his chest. "All right, you louse. Pack it up. Come on. Move it!"

"What? Why?" Kaze complained before Ranma grabbed him by the sleeve and hauled him to his feet. "Hey!"

"I'm not going to start berating you for doing this when you're a priest of justice or whatever," Ranma began as he shoved the evon to the side and started collecting the items, "because I don't know anything about your dumb religion, and you're the freaking avatar or whatever. So that's between you and your god. But we're the good guys, all right?"

"I was operating under that assumption, yes," Kaze mumbled sadly as Ranma wrapped up the blanket he was sitting on.

"And good guys don't cheat people out of their money by selling snake oil. Got it?"

"... What? What do snakes have to do with this?" The evon asked, scratching his head.

"It's just an expression! Now give me the money you made!" The pigtailed man demanded.

Kaze recoiled. "What? Oh, come on now! You're going to give it back?"

"Not really. I'm going to use it to pay for all the alcohol you and Rayden bought," Ranma said firmly. "Besides, most of the stuff you're selling isn't even yours! If you want personal cash, you're going to have to work for it."

"I DID work for it!" Kaze protested. "Do you know how hard it is to trick a ship of Jewish soldiers out of their money? Most of them wouldn't even pay full price!"

"You're not helping your case any," Ranma said as he grabbed Kaze by the front of his robes. "Now look here; I let you tag along with me on the assumption that you were going to make these journeys easier, not more frustrating. I have enough problems with Ray being a demon knight."

Kaze pouted as he handed over a stack of American dollars and a sack of coins. "What problem do you have with Shikodan?"

"Besides him getting in fights all the time that he can't win? Nothing, actually," Ranma admitted as he took the cash and started flipping through it. "Sometimes people get nervous around him 'cause he's a demon and his sword drinks the blood of the fallen, but that's not really a big deal, since he looks pretty human."

"That's fascinating, really. Tell me more about that," Kaze mumbled as he started to sneak away while Ranma was counting the money.

_Swsh!_ "Gwah!" The evon priest shouted in surprise as a length of chain suddenly wrapped around his arm and pulled him back. Looking behind him, he saw that the other end of the chain was wrapped around the gauntlet on Ranma's hand.

"Oh, no you don't. You're coming with me," Ranma deadpanned as he held the chain taut. "Since apparently I can't trust you to be on your own, you can help me find Ray, and then we'll all wait until Karen finishes giving her pitch to carry us to Greken's territory."

Kaze frowned deeply. "You know, this chain is mine. I made that kill. I was going to sell it. LEGITIMATELY."

"Oh, shut up," Ranma mumbled. Then he raised an eyebrow. "Though... since we're on the topic of your items... where's your staff, anyway?"

The cleric blinked. "Staff?"

"Yeah. The staff. The one that carries the super-important ancient artifact of ultimate power, or whatever. The symbol of your station as avatar?"

Kaze looked left, and then turned to the right, scanning across the ground. "Huh. I don't know."

A massive sweatdrop rolled down Ranma's head. "You don't know? You lost it?"

"Oh... uh... no..." Kaze scratched his head slowly. "I didn't... I mean, I think I left it in the general's quarters."

"What? You mean with June?" the pigtailed wanderer asked, alarmed. "What were you doing in her room?"

"Things that are not fit for public conversation," the evon said shamelessly.

Ranma spent a moment gaping, and then forced himself to accept Kaze's conduct so that he could move onto the more important issue. "So, this artifact, that's one of the most powerful items in your church, that separates you from all the other priests and gives you your station, that you wouldn't give up even to save yourself from a damn **dragon**... you just leave it behind on the floor of your girlfriend's bedroom?"

"Well... no, she's not really my girlfried," the cleric asserted. "More like an 'acquaintance with benefits' or something."

Ranma spent a moment rubbing his forehead as Kaze shrugged weakly. 'You know, in some ways, Kaze's worse than Rayden... Ray never just leaves his deadly arcane weapons lying around or tricks people. Why did I let these losers follow me?'

"Okay Koz, we'll look for your staff later. Let's find Rayden first. I get nervous about what he might be up to when I'm not around," Ranma mumbled as he snapped his wrist forward, causing the chain around Kaze to spontaneously unwind from his arm and coil back around Ranma's.

Kaze frowned as his eyes narrowed at the chain. 'Curses. Robbed of my ill-gotten gains and my slightly-more-legitimately-gotten spoils. Saotome is proving to be as formidible an obstacle as Bishop Saima... if not a much more reasonable one.' Not once did it occur to him that he had only decided to follow Ranma to learn from him in the first place.

"So where are we going to find our smash-happy, malevolent companion?" the cleric asked as he rubbed his arm.

"Well, since I warned him specifically NOT to fight anyone on the ship, that would mean he only has two things to keep him occupied all day and night: drinking and complaining about not fighting," Ranma said as he started walking toward the main entrance into the lower decks.

"Hmmm..." Kaze started to rub his chin as he considered this. "Is that truly all he does, day in and day out? The man is a member of an elite order of demonic templars, beholden to the ancient of murder and warfare, and is active a full twenty-four hours. Doesn't he have martial and religious practices that he must attend to regularly?"

"I dunno," Ranma mumbled. "If he does, I'm glad he does it when I'm not around. I don't need to be putting up with that sort of thing."

"Oh, come on now," Kaze pressed, speeding up to walk alongside his teacher. "You mean you're not even curious about his past or the mysteries of his power?"

"Koz, the guy's a behemoth who won't die when stabbed through the heart and carries around a sword that drinks blood. That's enough for me," Ranma asserted, looking uneasy. "I'm afraid that if I ask him too many questions, I'll learn something about him I'm just better off not knowing. For now all that's important is that he does what I say without asking questions."

"Ah. So what doubt he creates with his black origins, he makes up for in blind obedience and baseless loyalty?" the evon asked dryly.

"Whatever keeps him from killing us good guys." Ranma said as they walked down the hall, passing by the kitchens.

"What do you mean you don't have any pork products on board?!"

Ranma and Kaze froze as they heard Rayden shouting, and Ranma's face darkened. He promptly turned and opened the door.

"Look sir," said one of the chefs as he crossed his arms over his chest and glared up at the demon knight, "we'll allow you use of the kitchen as long as you don't cause trouble, but don't give us a hard time about this, all right?"

"No, I'm serious!" Rayden growled. "No pork? Everybody carries pork! What kind of army is this?"

"I'm not going to answer that question," the smaller man said dryly. "Look, no matter how much you whine about it, pig meat is not going to spontaneously appear in storage, so I suggest you simply choose something else and get to work."

Rayden glared in silence for several seconds. "FINE. Do you have any ham?"

"Of course not, you idiot!" the chef snapped.

"Damn... How about bacon?"

The chef was silent for several seconds. "If we DID... then you'd have to swear never to speak of it to anyone else on this ship."

"Yes. Sure. Anything to get some real meat around here," Rayden mumbled.

As the cook turned and entered the back, the demon knight felt someone tap him on the shoulder, and he turned around. "Eh? Ranma?"

"Yeah. Hi," Ranma said uncertainly. "I expected to find you drinking or brooding. What are you doing here?"

"Cooking," Rayden said simply. "Sometimes I do that between stints of drinking and brooding."

"Cooking for who?" Kaze asked curiously.

"Well, apparently Colonel Molsk was impressed by the food last night and the fact that it didn't kill her," the Dread Knight explained. "So she asked me to make something good for the strategic meeting when we passed each other in the hall a while ago."

"Oh. So what are you making her?" Ranma asked.

"Nothing. I told her to get bent. Then one of the marines asked if I could make some snacks for the next poker game I play with them, so here I am."

Ranma sighed. "Of course. Well, as long as you're mostly staying out of trouble, then I guess I should be glad."

"Eh? Why's that?" Rayden asked. Then he frowned as he noticed Kaze. "Dude, where'd your staff go?"

Kaze flinched and then chuckled nervously. "It's... ah... it's around."

The demon knight's eyes narrowed. "Around? Shouldn't you be a little more careful with your ancient artifacts? These things are dangerous!"

Kaze blinked, and then his own eyes narrowed. "And you're one to lecture me? How about you?"

"Eh? What about me?" The dark paladin asked, glancing over his shoulder at Darkrune's handle. "I still have my sword."

"And what about our little metallic friend?" Kaze asked, crossing his arms over his chest.

"What about K?" Rayden protested. "Since when am I his babysitter?"

"Since I told you to be after they finished stitching up the gaping holes in your torso," Ranma deadpanned.

Rayden was silent for a few seconds. "Oh. Right. Oops."

Kaze sighed and walked up to the taller man, taking the bandage that was wrapped around his face. "Never mind that. Your eye hasn't regenerated yet?"

"Nah. Eyes usually take a while. I guess they're sensitive or something," Rayden mumbled, rubbing the mass of scar tissue that used to be his eyelids as Ranma grimaced.

"Of course. Hold still." Kaze pressed his palm over Rayden's face, and a soft blue light emanated from his hand.

Ranma watched carefully as the damaged skin he could make out under Kaze's hand slowly seemed to darken and smooth itself out into fresh, healthy skin.

After about thirty seconds, Kaze pulled his hand away, and Rayden blinked repeatedly, his eyes and the rest of his face completely healed.

"So... wait... why didn't you just do that yesterday, when he was almost dead?" Ranma asked.

"Because I was nearly exhausted from doing battle with a mighty dragon," Kaze explained.

"Then why didn't you heal me this morning, when I was still in really bad shape?" Rayden asked.

"Because I was nearly exhausted from making sweet love to General Kitinski," Kaze explained, running a hand through his long, snow-white hair.

_Thunk!_ "Ow!" The evon grasped his head where Ranma had smacked him with his sheathed sword.

"All right you two, listen up: you're going to have to learn to put your teammates before your own petty pleasures, all right? This has to stop." The pigtailed man said sternly.

"Huh? What did I do wrong?" Rayden asked. "I nearly got ripped apart by a venom dragon to help you out."

"I know. And it just makes this whole mess worse and more confusing, because you're supposed to be the evil one here." Ranma crossed his arms over his chest. "Now come on. We have to find out what they're going to do with us. If they for some reason decide not to alter course and leave whatever important campaign they're in the middle of to transport four people - or really one person, a talking lizard, and two circus freaks - into dangerous enemy territory, then we're going to need a plan to get there on our own."

"Can't we just walk there? We were doing that before."

"Yeah, and look how far that got us before we got sidetracked," Ranma mumbled, rubbing his chin. "We never really had a plan for finding Greken in the first place. Really, I was pretty much counting on there being a whole bunch of dragons making a big ruckus so that it'd be obvious where they were coming from, but considering that we just got a whole bunch of them butchered, that might not work anymore."

"Good point," Kaze said, massaging his forehead. "Hmmmm... they captured a dragon, right? What about him?"

"What ABOUT him?" Ranma asked. "It'll probably take months to get anything out of him through interrogation."

"Why? Because dragons are so resilient?" Kaze asked.

Rayden snorted. "No, it's 'cause humans suck at torture."

"ACTUALLY, it's because we try not to abuse our prisoners of war," Ranma said sharply.

"Yeah. Lemme tell you, that makes torture pretty hard," the Dread Knight said, nodding. "Gimme ten minutes with him, and I'll have him talking."

Both Ranma and Kaze looked doubtful at this.

"You... DO know that the point of interrogation is to NOT kill the subject, right?" Kaze asked uneasily.

"Of course I do," Rayden snapped. "Look, just get me into the guy's cell without any guards around to notice the screams of agony and I'll get the info we need."

Ranma rubbed his chin. "Wellllll... it does seem kind of immoral to do this. And it's ALSO kind of questionable to go under the IEF's nose to do it, since the lizard is technically their prisoner. Never mind that bad things ALWAYS tend to happen whenever we let you do anything on your own, Ray." Then he shrugged. "On the other hand, we don't really have anything else to do while we wait for Karen to finish up her meeting, so sure, let's do it."

Kaze sweatdropped. "We don't? What about finding K? Or finding my staff? Or if we don't want to leave, we could always have lunch; I'm rather hun-" He suddenly blinked as he realized he was talking to himself, and then whirled around just as Ranma and Rayden walked out into the hall. "Hey! Wait! Don't leave me behind! I'm coming too!"

* * *

June sighed as she nursed the mug of coffee in her hands, frowning at the temperature. "Mmm... Colonel Molsk? A little help here?"

Karen reluctantly tapped her finger against the wall of the mug, and there was a brief fizzling noise as ice crystals spontaneously formed in the steaming liquid, only to instantly melt away.

"Ah. Thank you. Much better." Smiling softly, June took a sip of her coffee, then picked up a small folded piece of paper sitting next to her. "So you really think the dragons attacked just for Saotome, do you? Why?"

"I can't really say," Karen hedged. "It just seems like a convenient coincidence, don't you think? Ranma appears, apparently being hunted by dragons, and as soon as we take him on, a full flight of the blasted lizards attack us. It's not conclusive, but it's all I've got."

"This theory is problematic," June said dryly before taking another gulp of coffee. "For one thing, as soon as we propose it, they'll try to throw your little friends off the ship." She idly ran a hand through her hair as she opened the paper and glanced over it. "But realistically, I don't see a reason to tell our men that at all. Frankly, it doesn't make much sense. That dragon flight came prepared to fight an army, not an adventuring band. It's safe to say that whatever prompted the attack, their goal was the eradication of the Messiah." She looked up the colonel. "For that matter, if the dragon's goal was to eliminate Saotome, why attack him now, when he's under our protection? They could have waited until he departed the sandship, or sent warning that they would have attacked to force us to abandon him."

"These creatures aren't known for their subtlety," Karen remarked as she flipped through a combat report. "And any nearby demon lords could only benefit from the destruction of the Messiah."

"Precisely. So I think it's safe to say that our little Japanese friend didn't provoke this attack at all, isn't it?" June asked, raising an eyebrow.

Karen looked surprised, but quickly nodded. "R-Right! Uh..." She hesitated for a moment, but worked up the nerve to ask her next question. "General... I would have thought that you'd welcome the chance to get Saotome off this ship. Why would you be willing to overlook the possibility that his presence is endangering the IEF?"

"A few reasons," June mused as she took another sip of coffee. "For one thing, although I find Saotome's presence annoying personally, I respect him as a fighter and an individual, and would never intentionally seek to cause him harm. Second of all, as long as he's on the Messiah, he's under the IEF's jurisdiction and control, to a point. No matter how much I dislike him, I can't deny that he's always been a tremendously useful asset in combat. And finally, protecting Saotome from the attentions of scores of malevolent monsters falls squarely within the objectives of the IEF in the first place. Our mission is to protect humanity from the scourge of demons and magical beasts that threaten it, which naturally places our own lives and assets at risk; those men that died yesterday died doing their duty, for the protection of Israel and all mankind. **Regardless** of what those filthy reptiles really wanted. To that end, it would serve no purpose to tell my men that the dragons may have attacked because they were hunting Saotome. It would change nothing except our morale and convictions."

"O-Of course. I see," Karen said, impressed and quite relieved. "Then shall we discuss the location of this Greken character?"

"Of course," June mumbled, finishing her coffee and putting it aside. "What does our satellite surveillance tell us?"

"Very little, I'm afraid," Karen mumbled as she opened another folder. "Mongolia has had extremely unstable weather for years, and although we've confirmed that the dragon flight originated from that region, a number of storms kept us from pinpointing their nests or home territory."

She frowned as she looked over some of the photos she placed on the table, which were mostly dark blots with a few small holes representing the regions of clear sky. "From looking at recordings taken over several weeks, we can catch glimpses of enough land to find indications of mid-tech agricultural infrastructure and small settlements."

June nodded. "Of course. And any settlement in an area as desolate and hostile as this means that an army can't be far away keeping the peace. And where there's an army, there's usually a big, ugly freak bossing it around."

"What's strange about the photos is despite the turbulent weather, there are several zones which are apparently obscured twenty-four-seven. The memory banks can only backtrack for a week, but..."

June frowned. "But any storm that covers a single point for a whole week probably isn't natural in the first place. Which means this dragon tamer has some inkling of what he's doing if he's taken measures to protect against technology-based surveillance."

Karen sighed as she leaned over the photos. "Like everything else this guy apparently does, it's crude and blunt, but ultimately effective. Without more information, an airborne surveillance mission would be extremely dangerous, and scouting the territory on the ground would take at least a week after we reach the target area, assuming we don't face any more major assaults."

"I see. The ball is in our court, then," the IEF general mumbled. "Very well. We still have some time before the meeting. Let me tell you a story."

Karen blinked. "General?"

June smirked at the younger woman. "War forces us to grow up quickly, does it not? Look at you. Colonel at age 19. That's nothing short of ridiculous. You should be attending university and going to wild parties, living it up and enjoying life to fullest before starting your career. Instead you roam about the most desolate wastelands on the planets, constantly fighting for your life. You've slaughtered hundreds of creatures and entombed entire nests of non-humans in solid ice."

Karen winced. She wasn't really used to thinking of her career that way. "I wouldn't have it any other way. Israel needs me so that our children won't have to spend their lives fighting."

"Yes, yes, of course. But not everyone feels the same way," June said, still smirking. "Saotome certainly doesn't, does he? He's spent his entire life fighting and killing, and for what?"

Karen blinked. "What? Well, for the defense of-"

"Don't start," the general interrupted. "He's never fought for the defense of anything. He thinks nothing of peace, war, or the struggle of humanity. He knows personal hardship better than any of us, but Ranma doesn't think abstractly. He's not what you'd call a 'big-picture' kind of guy. He fights to protect himself. He fights to protect his friends and loved ones. He fights because it seems like a good idea at the time. It's all he does, all he is. He knows no other life. If you asked him what peace **was**, he'd probably refer to the brief periods between battles. Ranma Saotome is a creature of war."

Karen frowned at this, but said nothing.

"With that in mind, it's no surprise he was talked into being a test subject for Project Magi," June went on. "The dangers must have meant nothing to someone who lives as he does. If he even understood what the dangers were."

"You called the experiment a failure? What happened?"

The silver-haired woman sighed. "Somehow, the experiment resulted in a complete, permanent mana drain in his body."

Karen blinked. Twice. "Wait, what? What does that mean?"

"It means that Ranma Saotome's body, or soul, or whatever supposedly generates the magical power that you and I take for granted does not do so. Not only is Ranma incapable of using magic, but his body is abnormally devoid of mana."

"Wait... how is that possible? Can the human body survive without mana?"

June shrugged. "Nope."

Karen sweatdropped in response. "Oh... that's very strange, then."

"More than just strange. The absence of mana is a scientific aberration. It shouldn't be possible outside of a laboratory for any area other than hard vacuum. Medical experiments conducted after the fact have proven that a complete mana drain should be 100 percent fatal... yet, as you're quite aware, Saotome is alive and kicking. And the mana void around him is still there as well."

"What... What does that mean?" Karen asked softly.

"Well, putting aside the fact that he should be dead, I'm sure he has some trouble using magical items and machines. But aside from that, many magics apparently operate under the presumption that all living things - not to mention all non-living things - are irradiated with magical energies. So Saotome's probably immune or resistant to several magical effects, while other spells would have difficulty tracking him, or would function as if he wasn't there. We'd need to conduct tests on Ranma himself to find out more, and as you've probably guessed, he wasn't exactly keen on more experiments."

"Why did our scientists use a human test subject if it wasn't safe?" Karen asked heatedly. "How could they not have noticed a flaw like that?"

June shrugged. "They didn't really have an excuse... Saotome is a mercenary. To the IEF his life is nothing more than a unit number and an expense report. He's quite expendable."

The younger woman growled in irritation, but didn't protest the comment.

"I've made sure to check him discreetly every time I've seen him since he boarded the sandship. I can't imagine that you've tried using magesight on him, but if you had you would have noticed that he's apparently invisible to it," June said. "An interesting little tidbit, don't you think?"

"More than just interesting..." Karen mumbled, chewing her lower lip. "Why wasn't I told about this?"

The older woman snorted. "Who are YOU to be kept up-to-date on the horrific failures of various military experiments?"

Karen twitched. "Well, it has more to do with my... uhm..." she coughed into her fist briefly, flushing, "my 'relationship' with Ranma than my status. I specifically requested to be kept updated about that operation!"

"Apparently. I didn't know you two knew each other, so I can't really say, but I imagine that the scientists didn't want to worry you unnecessarily. Or necessarily, for that matter," the general deadpanned. "I'm sure they were incredibly relieved that Saotome somehow survived, so they probably just told you that the project failed, but he was fine. Technically true. Mostly." Then she shrugged. "You didn't have the rank to warrant more details than that."

The sandy-haired woman frowned, her brow creasing. "You called him... a creature of war? Do you really think that?"

"Of course. The boy was an utterly lethal assassin at age fourteen, for Moses' sake. He slits throats like it's a common chore, and can sleep in the middle of a full-scale engagement. And when he isn't fighting or resting from fighting, he's training to fight. He literally doesn't know what to with himself outside of battle."

Karen winced at that statement, and clutched one hand to her chest as she thought about her superior's words. "I... I think you're right... it's kind of sad, you know?" She looked up at the older woman, obviously distressed. "He's never known anything **but** conflict. He's never had the opportunity to live a normal life. I don't even think he knows what that means. He grew up without a family, without a home... we all left our homes and what's left of our families to live a life like his for our profession... and it's horrible... no one should have to live like this for their entire lives. No one deserves this much suffering and hatred."

"Do you intend to change that?" June asked, raising an eyebrow.

Karen started, her face flushing again. "What?"

"Are you going to give him a 'normal life'?" June clarified. "Give him a wife to look after and spend those cold, lonely nights with? Give him a place he can come home to at the end of the day? A job where his life is never in danger, a future without so much blood? Hmm?"

The sandy-haired woman winced again, her head slumping. "I'd love to... but... Ranma could never live like that, could he? Hmph. Sometimes I wonder if I could still live like that."

"These conflicts have left us all scarred," June spat. "I fear the world we once knew is entirely beyond recovery."

The general sighed. "But enough about our personal pursuits. We have more important concerns. The other officers should be arriving in minutes, and we should have a complete plan of action ready to propose to them."

"Yes, General..."

* * *

"Hey, check it out..."

One of the two guards stationed outside of the high-security holding cell gestured down the hall, and his companion turned lazily to see what he was looking at.

"It's those mercs. Whaddya think they want?" The other man asked, tapping his fingers against his rifle as the three men approached them.

"They probably want to talk to the freak inside. Let me handle this," the first man insisted, stepping into the middle of the hall and holding his gun at an angle.

Once the wanderers got within two meters and showed no signs of stopping, he spoke. "Can I help you gentlemen with anything? This is a restricted area."

At some unspoken signal, Kaze stepped forward ahead of Ranma and Rayden. "Yes, I believe you can. We would like to have some alone time with our scaly friend in this cell, here."

"Uh huh," the guard deadpanned. "You DO realize that allowing you to do this would violate our current directive to keep our prisoner safely isolated, right?"

Kaze smirked. "No it wouldn't," he said flatly, waving his hand briefly.

The guard blinked. "Wait... what? Yes it would."

"No, it wouldn't," Kaze insisted, waving his hand again.

The guard looked dizzy for a moment, and then shook his head. "I can't let you in here without orders from someone of the appropriate rank."

Kaze waved his hand once more. "You don't need any ord-"

"Look, would you cut that out? You're giving me a migraine, here!" The Israeli complained, clutching the side of his head.

The evon sweatdropped, and then whirled around. "Ah... it would seem we've hit a bit of a snag," he mumbled to Ranma.

Rayden snorted and immediately stepped forward. "Step back and let me show you how it's done," he said, slipping his hands into his pockets.

"Ray," Ranma said warningly, his eyes narrowing.

Rayden flashed the smaller man a reassuring smile, and then turned the same smile toward the guard.

"Hey, I remember you! Sergoi, right?"

The guard nodded. "Yeah, that's me."

"You know him?" The other guard asked, nudging his partner in the shoulder.

"Poker game last night," Sergoi explained. "This guy nearly took my pants in hold 'em."

"Yeah, good times," Rayden interrupted brashly. "So I was wondering if you could do us a favor and let us in there for a minute."

"Again, the answer is no," Sergoi said firmly. "What if you put the ship in danger? I don't know what you're going to do with him in there."

"I'm going to beat him into a rotten, bloody pulp," the demon knight explained, grinning as he pounded a fist into his palm.

Sergoi blinked. "Oh. Is that all?" He hesitated for a moment, then shook his head. "It's still a violation of orders though, so..."

"What if I give you back the money I won last night?" Rayden asked, sticking his hand in his pocket and withdrawing a stack of bills.

Almost immediately, the guard snatched away the money, backing away to the other side of the hall. "I can't answer your question, as I'm fairly sure there's no one around trying to get access to the prisoner, and I'm a little busy counting this money I found on the floor." He promptly entered a keycode into the console opposite the cell door, and there was a beeping noise as several interior security devices were deactivated.

Ranma and Kaze sweatdropped as the other guard looked alarmed.

"Hey! Sergoi! You can't be serious! We can't just-" The man blinked as his companion stuffed several American twenty-dollar bills in his breast pocket. "We can't just stand here talking to the walls as if someone else was here! Tell me again about your trip to the Congo."

"I'm not sure if I should be impressed by what I just saw." Ranma asked as the Dread Knight turned around and gave his companions a thumbs-up.

"You shouldn't," Kaze confided. "Bribing soldiers is an old, tried-and-true diplomatic technique. It's practically guaranteed to work."

"Why didn't you try it?" Ranma asked as Rayden opened the door to the cell and stepped inside.

"Because I'm cheap," the evon insisted, crossing his arms over his chest. "Psychic energy is free. Find me a spell to magically counterfeit Earth currencies, and then we'll see about using my precious traveling funds for the sake of getting critical information."

"I don't mean to interrupt," Sergoi said suddenly from across the hall, "especially as you're not actually here in the hallway, waiting for your friend to torture the dragon, but... you have to be the worst priest I've ever met."

"No I'm not," Kaze countered, waving his hand about.

"I told you to cut that out!"

* * *

Rayden calmly pushed the door closed behind him as he stepped into the containment area, his eyes scanning the cell interior.

The area was filled with numerous energy projectors, probably used to emit energy fields and magic-nullifying waves that had been turned off. As Rayden wasn't particularly adept at technology, he couldn't really guess as to the particulars, and didn't really care so long as they were safely deactivated and out of his way.

The innermost area of the relatively small cell was a cylindrical area with heavy adamantite chains mounted on the ceiling, floor, and walls. On the other end of the chains, sitting in a simple wooden chair in the middle of the cell and staring distastefully at his visitor, was the storm dragon in human guise.

The creature was unfrozen, but Rayden doubted he had been like that for long; the air of the cell held a sharp, prickling chill, and a few stray chunks of ice still littered the metal floor within glistening puddles of water.

"Hmph. They send the demon," the storm dragon mumbled as he turned his head away. "Stupid humans..."

Rayden smiled unpleasantly as he approached, flexing his fingers and feeling the rough leather protecting them. "Yeah. They sent the demon. Let's make this quick, scaly; I haven't killed anything all day, and the faster we get this meeting over with, the faster I can get to wherever you came from and kill everything you've ever loved."

The dragon laughed, which sounded something like sandpaper applied roughly to a steel pipe. "Your arrogance is quite remarkable for low-borne filth."

"Says the guy laughing at the dark swordsman while he's bound, unarmed, and disabled," Rayden deadpanned. "Anyhoo, I'm sure you know what I want to know, so let's get started. You got a name, or is 'Scaly' good?"

"My name is Jihnaal'm, second prince of-"

"Your name is stupid, so I'm gonna call you Jim," Rayden said, stepping up to the bound dragon and planting a foot on his leg. "So Jim, where's your nest?"

The newly-dubbed Jim snarled, his voice trailing off into a low growl. "My nest is in the western region of the land you call Mongolia, within the great chasm known as Olahan's Maw. It was named after the demon general who was slain there in the final campaign to crush the last remnants of the humans in this section of the wastes. I'm sure your maps make note of it."

Rayden blinked. "Wait... what?"

"All around the chasm you'll find human settlements. Mostly farms, towns, and nesting lairs for grends. Guarding these lands are three great fortresses garrisoned with Master Greken's army."

Rayden took his foot off the dragon's leg, looking absolutely perplexed.

"The largest fortress, built into the side of an artificial volcano and home to most of the fire and magma dragon nests, is where Master Greken resides. And though his normal army is spread throughout the land and his various campaigns, his dragon army flies by his command alone." The dragon smirked. "To reach this fortre-gurk!"

Jim stopped speaking as Rayden suddenly grabbed the top of his head, and then pulled him - as well as the chains wrapped around him - into the air so that they were eye-to-eye.

"What the hell? Why are you spilling your guts so easily?" Rayden growled. "You'd better not be lying, Jim!"

"Lying? Pft!" The storm dragon took a moment to spit on the demon knight's coat, and then continued, mildly disappointed that Rayden didn't seem at all upset about the minor gesture of defiance. "You fool! I have no reason to lie! Now that we have failed in our task to destroy you, what better way to see to your destruction than to lead you straight to your doom? What you faced yesterday was but a fraction of Master Greken's full might! Go! Throw yourselves to your executioner!"

Rayden stared at him a few moments longer. "... Well, whatever. I was all worked up to beat the fire breath out of you, and there's no way I'm holding back just because you gave up all the information I wanted."

"I'm a storm dragon, you imbecile! I don't have fi-" _Whump!_ "Saah! _Cough!" WHAM! Crack!_

* * *

"I'm rather surprised he gave up the information so easily," Kaze muttered as the trio once again walked down the hall. "Though I imagine you gave him quite a beating, it's no mean feat to break a serpent king. And without any proper torture equipment, yet!"

"Yeah, sure. I was real persuasive-like," the demon knight mumbled, looking distinctly unsatisfied and bearing a scorch mark over his chest where the draconic prisoner had tried to fight back.

"Did you use any magic? I'll bet your school of magic has a variety of spells for intimidation, doesn't it?"

"Not really, no," Rayden deadpanned.

"Well, the important thing is that we got the info and we're pretty sure it's accurate," Ranma interrupted. Not that he really trusted Rayden to be able to tell if he was being lied to; but really any starting point for their search was better than tromping around in a vaguely defined stretch of wasteland waiting to get attacked by dragons.

Kaze nodded. "Indeed. What is our plan, then?"

"Well, first we should tell Karen about this and see if the IEF is interested in carrying us a little farther."

"Would it not be best to convince them to launch an attack?" Kaze asked. "With their resources and technology combined with our own skills, they should be able to topple Greken's defenses while we finish him off personally."

"Not happening," Ranma said, shaking his head. Seeing Kaze's perplexed look, he sighed and rubbed at the gem set in the gauntlet on his hand. "Look, these dragons aren't just random wandering monsters or bandit raiders; they're hunting me and this... thing. I'm not sure why, and I'm not planning on giving it up to them, but I can't drag the IEF into this fight. Too many people have already been killed just because they took me in for a day. I'm not gonna ask them to fight any more of my battles for me."

"We don't need them anyway," Rayden said flippantly. "You got us, remember?"

"Yeah, sure," Ranma deadpanned, "and if you guys get killed because dragons are hunting me, it's your own damn fault for tagging along. My conscience is clear."

Kaze sweatdropped as Rayden nodded happily. "So, going back to my original question, what exactly is the plan, if we're facing a demon lord on our own?"

"We don't really have one," Ranma admitted, stopping as the group reached an intersection and looking both ways, trying to decide where to go. "I mean, we should obviously lay low and try to sneak into his territory without attracting the attention of anything big enough to destroy a city-"

"Boooooooriiiiiiiing," Rayden sang, only to be ignored.

"-but beyond that, I don't know. I'll come up with something once we're there," Ranma finished, shrugging.

The evon winced. "I was really hoping for something more... comprehensive than that. A brilliant strategy to cripple his defenses, perhaps, or a secret sword technique for slaying dragons in a single blow."

"I have a secret sword technique for slaying dragons in a single blow!" Rayden volunteered.

"Yeah, but it sucks," Ranma mumbled. "Look Koz, you wanted to tag along to learn about adventuring, right? Here's something to remember: plans are great, but it's a lot more important to stay flexible and learn to improvise. No matter how clever your strategy, it can all come apart if something unexpected happens. The farther ahead you plan, the more likely that it'll fail, and the more work you put into a strategy, the harder it'll be to ditch the plan and work something out when things go wrong." He turned to the right, and the two cultists promptly turned to follow.

"Well, do you mind if **I** think up a brilliant plan, then?" The cleric asked. "I recognize your superiority in these affairs, but I've learned to appreciate the conventional wisdom of thinking ahead."

"Knock yourself out," the pigtailed man said, "but don't count on dragging anyone else into it."

Rayden was about to comment as well, when he noticed a procession of Israelis rounding the corner at the end of the hall, all of them looking unsurprised and quite unhappy to see them.

"Eh? What now?" The demon knight asked. "I didn't do anything bad recently, did I?"

Kaze winced as the group approached. "What about beating a prisoner of war to obtain information?" He whispered.

"That doesn't count. He deserved it!"

"All right you two, shut it!" Ranma hissed, preparing to mollify the mysteriously upset soldiers. "Just stand back here and look innocent! Let me handle this!"

The group of IEF soldiers consisted almost entirely of army officers, with General June Kitinski at the head, a stony frown etched on her face.

Colonel Karen Molsk trailed behind her, and was the only Israeli who didn't look either angry or morbidly serious. She was obviously upset, but gave the distinct impression that she was very concerned about what was about to happen, rather than some other event that must have riled up the rest of them.

Ranma, ever the expert on dealing with people who were obviously annoyed at him, decided to take the initiative. "Hey June! What's goin' on? The strategy meeting over already?"

The number of frowns increased as June twitched at Ranma's usual overly-casual speech.

"Yes Saotome. The meeting was... brief," she said calmly, stopping a few feet away and staring expressionlessly at the mercenary. "Among the issues presented, we discussed your request to be transported into Mongolia under the protection of the IEF."

Ranma nodded, looking hopeful. "Right, right. So, what'd you decide?"

"REJECTED," the general said firmly, producing a sheet of paper and shoving it in Ranma's face.

The wanderer stumbled back before taking the paper. "Huh? What's this?"

"It's a formal order for you to evacuate from the Messiah," a different officer explained. "Many of us wanted to simply throw you off, but given your valuable assistance in the conflict yesterday, we ultimately decided to do this officially and civilly. That form details what time you and your group should be off the sandship, and what supplies will be provided to you. It also makes note of what costs your group have incurred that are being forgiven - again, due to your selfless actions in the battle yesterday."

The pigtailed boy looked utterly confused as Kaze snatched the paper out of his hands. "Wh-What? Are you serious?"

"We prefer to leave bureaucracy out of our practical jokes," June deadpanned. "I can assure you that we're serious."

"I don't understand," Kaze mumbled, looking up from the document, "What are all these strange charges here that have been attributed to us? I've never even heard of some of these materials!"

"Forget that!" Ranma interrupted, scowling. "I understand if you don't want to go where we want, but why are we being booted off the ship?"

In response, the group of officers suddenly parted, allowing the three men to see two individuals who were standing in the back.

Well, technically, there were three individuals, if one thought of small pet dragons in that manner. Emrey and Garron were holding K in the air by his wings, as if the metallic draconian were a dangerous prisoner rather than an impulsive pest. The dragon wasn't bound in general, although he was muzzled.

Ranma's face darkened as all the pieces fell into place in his mind.

"Hey! There's K!" Rayden said, grasping the most obvious feature of this encounter and totally missing the implications of what he was seeing. "Thanks for finding him, guys. He can get into trouble if you don't watch him."

June's eyebrow twitched. "We've noticed."

Kaze spent a few more moments perusing the "bill" Ranma had been handed, and nervously pointed to an item near the bottom. "Ah... so... what exactly is 'plutonium'? It's not that important... is it?"

The IEF general ignored him as she walked back to the two demons holding K in the air. "Saotome, your pet dragon has not only caused dangerous structural damage by eating his way into our supply and munitions closets, but he's also set us back **billions** of dollars' worth of materials and munitions. To his credit, he managed to restrain himself from eating any equipment, though he did devour two of our artillery shell prototypes."

Ranma started massaging his head as Rayden whistled.

"In light of this, and the considerable damage to our weapons research, it was... ALMOST unanimously decided that either your party or your little friend here must be removed from the ship." She raised an eyebrow, planting a hand on her hip. "Was I presumptuous in assuming that you would not tolerate the dragon's being evicted without the rest of you?"

Ranma's face colored for a moment as he stamped down his frustration. "Nah, you're right. We'll leave."

"Are you serious?!" Kaze shouted, waving the removal notice in the air. "Why should we have to be punished for this? We're heroes! And we're going to be launched into the dangerous, barren wastes because the little smart-mouthed monster that tags along with us can't control himself?"

"Yes, pretty much," June admitted. "Responsibility is a terrible and frightening thing, isn't it?"

As Kaze started grumbling and looking over the order again, June turned and snapped her fingers. "Release the pest."

Emrey, who Ranma noticed was trying and failing not to look especially smug, bowed extravagantly and then removed the muzzle from around K's beak.

As soon as the restraint was loose enough, the metadragon tossed his head to throw it to the side. "Lies! Lies, I say! I've been framed!"

Ranma, Rayden, and Kaze all sweatdropped.

"Framed. Really." Ranma deadpanned.

"Yes! This is all a setup!" K shouted, glaring at the rakshasa holding one of his wings. "This clown just wants us off the ship to break up Ranma and the Colonel! This is a conspiracy of jealousy and lust, I tell you!"

Karen looked startled at the accusation, though the other officers looked quite unconvinced. "Lieutenant? What do you have to say to that?"

Emrey snorted. "Please. That's ridiculous. How would I have accomplished something like that?"

Kaze put down the notice he was reading, and his eyes narrowed. "As I recall, stealth and duplicity is your specialty. Combined with a legitimate rank in the IEF, such a charade would be fully within your abilities."

Ranma scratched his head. "Uh... can't you just use your powers to check if he's lying or not?"

"No, I cannot," the evon said regretfully. "Rakshasa have their own powers to cloak their mind from my psychic abilities. It would take a full magical interrogation to wrench the truth out of him."

"Okay. Go ahead," June said.

"Hey!" Emrey complained, glaring at the general.

Kaze blinked. "What? Wait... are you serious?"

"If it means resolving this idiotic farce to everyone's satisfaction, by all means, do it," she said flatly. "Will any torture be required? I'd need to fill out some paperwork for that."

"HEY!!"

By this time the other officers were muttering to each other in disgust and annoyance, and Ranma was considering just leaving right then and there just to end the humiliation. K's claim wasn't very plausible, though if it was true, he really didn't want to be blamed for the damage and let the envious assassin get the better of him.

Needless to say, it surprised everyone when Rayden, of all people, came up with a simple and honest solution to the situation.

"Look, this is stupid. The shifter couldn't have done all that stuff," the demon knight insisted.

Karen looked skeptical. "While I'm not willing to declare him guilty just yet, it DOES sound like the sort of thing he'd do. How do you know?"

"Because he spent all day trying to get Ranma booted off the ship by taking on his form and then stealing from the armory and lockers that have security cameras watching them," Rayden explained.

All the IEF present promptly turned sharply toward Emrey, who held an indignantly surprised expression even as beads of sweat started rolling down his forehead.

"I saw him skulking around in 'Ranma form' while I was looking for some coins I lost recently," Rayden explained (To Kaze's credit, he didn't flinch or give any suspicious response to this). "He tried to play it off like he was Ranma, but he doesn't know Ranma very well so it was a pretty bad impression. You know, besides the whole demonic aura thing. That also kinda gave him away."

Smiling, the Dread Knight crossed his arms over his chest. "So you see, K's obviously making that story up. He ate all your stuff and he's just trying to push the blame onto the shifter because no one likes the creepy lech."

K and Kaze both glared at Rayden, but couldn't really say anything under the circumstances. Emrey could have said lots of things, but was dearly afraid that the glare Karen was giving him was going to set him on fire if he agitated her further.

"Your honesty is appreciated," June said flatly. "Now get out."

"All right, all right. Give 'em here," Ranma mumbled, snatching K out of Emrey's hands and then handing the metadragon to Rayden.

"I-I'm really sorry about this-" Karen started to stutter, but June cut her off.

"You have nothing to be sorry for, Colonel. Saotome's band earned the gratitude of the IEF through their heroic acts yesterday, and exhausted that gratitude thanks to their foolishness." Her eyes narrowed. "As you leave here today, Saotome, we are officially 'even'. The IEF will suffer these pointless losses as thanks for your courage in battle. And if we encounter your little group in the future, we'll simply pretend this little incident never happened. Though I DO hope you'll have better control of your shiny little friend if and when that happens."

Karen nodded hesitantly. "Ah... as you might have noticed, among the supplies we're giving you on your departure, we're also granting you two N-880 armored all-terrain hoverbikes for transport."

"They ARE rather expensive," one of the other officers deadpanned, "so we advise you not let the dragon eat them."

"Gotcha. Thanks," Ranma said, bowing his head slightly. "And I really am sorry about this."

"I'm sure. Any other questions?" June asked.

Kaze promptly raised his hand. "One, actually... the time of departure listed on this notice?"

"What about it?"

"It was four o'clock," Kaze noted, pointing to the appropriate line on the document. "That was an hour ago."

"Oh!" June said, as if she was surprised. "So it was!"

* * *

"Whoa!"

"Hey!"

"Gah!"

"Oof!"

Ranma barely managed to roll out of the way before Rayden landed on the ground face-first, kicking up a cloud of dust as the demon knight left a heavy impression of his considerable bulk in the dry, parched landscape of the wastes.

Looking up, the pigtailed man's eye twitched as he saw K slowly lower himself down through the air from the bottom of the vast sandship hovering above.

Next to him, Kaze slowly floated downward as well, although his method involved a lot less flapping of wings and some sort of magical circle under his feet.

"You can fly?" Ranma asked bluntly of the evon.

"No, not really," Kaze said, looking frustrated. "I can hover for a ways, though."

Then the cleric looked up at the hangar he was tossed out of. "Can I at least have my magic orb back, please? It's really important!"

Rayden grumbled to himself as he pushed himself up off the ground, and then started dusting his coat off. "I can understand that they want us off the ship, but they didn't have to literally throw us-" _CLANG!_ His head pitched forward as the Eye of Malakai slammed into the back of his head, sending him once again face-first into the dirt. "Son of a..."

Without further farewells or fanfare, the hangar slowly sealed shut, and the roar of magitech engines filled the air around the adventurers as the dreadnaught began moving.

K landed on the ground gingerly next to the decently-sized pile of food and supplied sitting next to a pair of gleaming vehicles without wheels.

"Uh... look, I guess there really isn't anything I could say to make up for that back there..." the metadragon said awkwardly.

He was immediately seared by the twin glares of Ranma and Kaze.

"No, there isn't," Ranma snapped. "If you wanna make up for it, NOT talking would be a good place to start."

"Indeed," Kaze agreed as he picked up his artifact in both hands. "It is truly a wonder that one of the 'ancient' and 'wise' serpent kings has such pathetic self-control, to say nothing of your poor grasp of ethics."

"Oh, shut up!" Ranma said angrily, turning on the priest. "You were trying to scam every gold coin you could out the soldiers up there! And how long did it take before you were trying to get into June's pants... uh... I mean, swimsuit uniform... thing..."

"That's precisely my point," Kaze said shamelessly as he swept a hand down, causing a flare of light to turn his precious sphere into a proper staff. "If you really must give in to your base desires, you must learn to do it discretely."

"I don't freaking believe this," Ranma growled as he rubbed his forehead. "Out of all of you idiots, the only one who didn't get into any trouble was the goddamned bloodthirsty, blockheaded dark demon paladin with the blood-sucking sword!"

"Yeah! You're making me look bad!" Rayden complained. "Er... I mean, making me look good! Wait..."

"That's not entirely true," Kaze said smugly. "Shikodan DID enrage General Kitinski to the point of nearly being disintegrated."

"Oh, right," the demon knight said as Ranma hung his head in defeat. "Though to be fair, enraging her to that point doesn't actually take much work."

"I hate my life," Ranma said, slowly stumbling toward the bikes and supplies. "I had it so good... walk around wherever I want... spend everything I earn... a few fights, a few parties, maybe hang out with a pretty girl every now and then... and now all of a sudden I'm being chased by dragons and driven out of holy cities and kicked off of army cruisers..."

Rayden sweatdropped. "Well... yeah... but you have to weigh that against the fact that you don't have to cook anymore!"

_Thwack!_ Rayden wasn't entirely sure when and how Ranma struck him, but the sound of something impacting his skull was followed by intense pain, followed in turn by the Dread Knight stumbling over and tasting dirt for the third time in as many minutes.

Kaze winced, well aware that he was on very shaky ground with their group's leader as well. Not to mention that he lacked both Rayden's cultural background to excuse his selfish behavior, and Rayden's ridiculously sturdy skeleton. "But really, when we look back at the core of these difficulties, one of our most pressing problems is K's absurd feeding habits. You must have consumed, what, four metric tons of metals? More? Shouldn't you be much bigger? Or at least too heavy to fly?"

"I dunno. My metabolism IS magical," K mumbled, looking quite ashamed and withdrawn.

Rayden shook his head to try and stop the rattling noises inside his skull, and then smiled and picked the little dragon off the ground. "Aw, don't worry about it, little guy! I thought the whole mess was funny! Especially when you tried to blame everything on the rakshasa!"

"Then why'd you mess it up?" K mumbled, trying to keep Ranma from overhearing so as to not irritate him further.

"Just to see the look on his face, mostly," Rayden admitted. "Wasn't really worth it. I suppose a shifter WOULD be pretty good at hiding his surprise."

Ranma stopped in front of the pair of bikes, his expression leaden as he looked over the gleaming equipment.

The hoverbikes were definitely cutting edge, with a blast shield covering the front of the vehicle to deflect oncoming fire. The rear looked more fragile, with a large base situated behind the driver's seat to accommodate cargo or a second passenger. Behind that was a trio of relatively large engines that looked more suited to a space shuttle than a land vehicle.

Not a bad piece of equipment to have practically shoved into your arms, but it was no flying fortress.

'Maybe I should really just take off and leave these guys on their own...' he thought, running a hand over the polished surface of the frontal shield. 'I mean, it's me the dragons are after... they'd probably be much safer without me around. They'd probably...'

His expression darkened as images started running through his head: Rayden being crushed against a wall, Kaze fleeing for his life, and K trapped in a cage, begging for help. 'Who am I kidding? These idiots wouldn't last a week without me!'

"Hey, what're you standing around for?" the pigtailed man shouted suddenly, startling the two humanoids with him to attention. "We've got a bunch of gear sitting around in a big pile, and two shiny new transports to carry them with! Why should the guy without telekinesis or demonic strength have to do all the heavy lifting?"

"R-Right!" Rayden shouted, dashing toward the bikes and Kaze scurried after him. K skulked after them, trying to make himself nice and invisible.

'Well, it may suck, but things could be a lot worse, I guess,' the wanderer thought to himself as he sat down next to a rock outcropping. 'They do try, and they all do what I say. And for all the problems they've caused, I don't really want to venture into a bunch of dragon nests by myself.' He sighed tiredly as a series of small boxes floated by unsteadily. 'I can't even imagine all the problems we're going to be having down the road.'

* * *

"Ahhhh... Russia!" Doppler said pleasantly as he stepped out of the swirling blue portal and into the brisk mid-afternoon air. He raised his hands in the air - only two of them at present, as he was disguised as a human - and whirled about playfully as a tall, dark-skinned man stepped out of the portal behind him. "The only land utterly ravaged by demonkind that remains precisely as unpleasant and inhospitable as before! A marvelous place!" He chuckled wryly as he glanced about their arrival point, first making a mundane check of the area with his most mundane senses before moving on to more complicated searches.

The man behind him shifted uncomfortably as he moved closer to his master in order to be better prepared for any incoming threats; Doppler's disguise was very simple and truthfully not overly different from his actual form. Tio's body, however, was altered quite a bit to complete a plausible image of humanity. Everything from the structure of his heel to the lack of his horns felt bizarre and unnatural.

Doppler finished inspecting the area - a small, snowy clearing within a sparse cluster of evergreen trees - and promptly began casting spells. Great flares of light were followed by strings of archaic runes, drawn in the air with mere thought, and the flow of mana in the area suddenly seeped into half a dozen powerful enchantments within short order, telling the veirheelu lord the details of the area within several miles of his position and protecting his exit point from accidental intrusion.

"Ah, yes. Security appears to be light," Doppler said happily as he set off in one direction, Tio following nervously. "As would be expected. There's very little around here except wandering undead. Bandits have no settlements to attack, and no demon lord would want to construct holdings up here with so little arable land and so many riches to fight over in the south. Even scientist liches would find this place too bleak to call home."

Tio said nothing as Doppler continued talking, gleefully explaining at length how the many resources of Russian civilization had been overlooked by the demon lords after the armies had plundered Russia's palaces and then turned west, toward the weak, wealthy lands of Europe. All sorts of valuable things had been left behind, explained the demonic wizard, mostly because of the demons' chronic ineptitude with the technological. Vast stores of powerful weapons, some capable of intercontinental mass destruction, had been left to rust just like the gutted remains of the tanks that desperately tried to defend them.

Of course, Doppler wasn't interested in such things himself; to him a nuclear missile was a shamefully blunt weapon, incapable of discrimination or restraint. Though he could secure such devices for his own use, he had no use for the ridiculous things. Even if he one day decided that he was quite bored of the Earth realm and wished it all pointlessly destroyed, he could think of a dozen more entertaining and productive ways than simply wrapping the planet in mushroom clouds.

No, the crafty wizard was after much older artifacts originating from civilizations thoroughly buried beneath the snow and rock underneath his feet.

He just hoped there was some good stuff still left; those excitable archaeologists tended to get all the good stuff before a proper evil power could charge in and steal what was left.

"I think I see the camp, Master," Tio grumbled, stepping forward and holding a hand to his brow.

Doppler muttered a few quick words, activating a minor cantrip that improved his vision such that he could see the camp interior as if he had binoculars. His prize was situated in the center of the settlement, and appeared as a tremendous metal stage with a huge hole in the center leading down into the Earth, with numerous cranes and scaffolding all around it to support the powerful lifts that took people in and out of the cavern. Around the staging area were numerous tents and larger module buildings, with a small barricaded area that held the camp's generators, communications relays, and water purifier. Around the perimeter of the camp was a sturdy, barbed chainlink fence; this model had two layers of links, both reinforced by thick wires running between them. While the fence wouldn't even slow down several of the creatures that roamed the southern wastes, it was more than enough to stop zombies, and would probably stymie many of the weaker demons that couldn't fly or use projectiles.

Doppler couldn't help but smirk when he saw the large scorch marks outside the camp that were each covered in burnt human skeletons; the corpse piles, no doubt, from the numerous undead that attacked the camp. These humans knew what they were doing. Unfortunately, it wouldn't be enough. Not nearly enough.

"Halt! Identify yourself!"

Tio growled irritably as a pair of warmly-dressed men approached from the side, aiming their rifles at the pair. The advanced build of their weapons, in addition to the more obvious patch of an American flag on their sleeves, identified them as U.S. military personnel.

It's doubtful Doppler was surprised by their appearance, and if he was, he wouldn't have shown it anyway. "Why hello, gentlemen! A rather nippy day out, isn't it? My name is Douglas Theadore, and this is my associate, Tio. How may I help you?"

The soldiers stopped, and they lowered their rifles so that it was pointing in the intruders' general direction, rather than being actively aimed at their heads. "This is a restricted area. We're sorry, but you need to evacuate immediately."

"Oh, but I see a settlement just over there," Doppler said excitedly, pointing over toward the camp. "We've been having an awful time with all these monsters and whatnot, and were hoping-"

"Hold on just a minute," the second soldier interrupted, raising his goggles so that he could more effectively glare at the intruders. "Just where are you two from, anyways? What're you doing way out here?"

"We're from the urban ruins of Moscow," the veirheelu lied. "We're on a bit of an expedition to find any weapons stockpiles that may be lying around. You see-"

"Moscow? You're from Moscow?" The man interrupted again. "Your English is pretty damn good for a Ruskie native living in a burnt-out hellhole. And are we seriously supposed to believe you came all the way from Moscow without any supplies? Neither of you even have a pack."

"A zombie took my pack," Doppler said irritably, "and as it was empty anyway, I saw little point to trying to take it back. We're in rather severe need of supplies."

"We can give you some food, but that's it," the first man said firmly. "We're not a trading settlement, and we have limited supplies ourselves. Now we're going to escort you to a safe area about two miles from here. If you wait there, we'll have food brought up for you, and you can start your journey back to Moscow or wherever."

Doppler frowned as his mind churned. How to address this minor obstacle? Force seemed fully appropriate, as he'd have to eventually take over the entire complex anyway, but he was always leery of resorting to personal violence right out of the starting gate when on a mission. He could magically take over both the humans with relative ease, but wasn't sure that would delay his discovery for long; the Americans seemed to keep a very strict protocol, and apparently they were sharp enough to spot the small discrepancies in his cover.

'Ah, to the Abyss with it. Tio looks like he could use some stress relief.'

Doppler sighed and raised a hand. "I'm afraid a bit of food will not do. I'll require more than that... the artifacts within your excavation will be a good start."

The soldiers immediately aimed their rifles again as Doppler snapped his fingers.

_Zwshng!_ Before either of the soldiers could fire, one of them was sliced clean in half by Tio's blinding charge, and a shimmering blue glow accented the bright wash of crimson as the magically disguised devil completed his lunge, landing far behind his enemies while holding a glowing scimitar.

The remaining soldier, shocked as he was by his partner's sudden death, let his instincts take over and promptly fired a burst into Doppler... or rather, into the invisible barrier around Doppler.

The veirheelu shook his head as the projectiles bounced off his shield, falling to the ground uselessly. "Humans... you ALWAYS have to resist, don't you?"

The soldier, still painted with the blood spray from his partner, seemed to hesitate for a moment, and then suddenly turned and ran for the encampment, his hand fumbling for his radio.

Doppler briefly gestured to Tio, and the demonic henchman snapped his arm to his waist, causing a wrist-mounted crossbow to appear on his arm as if by magic (which it was, obviously).

A split-second later a slight snapping noise heralded the end of the scout's life right before a crossbow bolt glowing a brilliant purple plunged into his back, sending him tumbling forward into the snow.

_Shooooom!_ The purple glow rapidly encompassed the entire man as he writhed about painfully, and within seconds he was still as his spirit was systematically ejected from his body in a flare of violet flame.

"Well, that pretty much set the pace for the rest of the evening, I suppose," the demon lord mumbled. "I suppose we'd better attack before they realize what-"

_MREEEEEEEM!! MREEEEEEEEM!!_

Doppler whirled around as a painfully loud siren started screeching, and he was surprised to see a small, spherical robot drone hovering in the air next to a tree. Mounted on the front was visual sensor, which was positioned such that it probably saw his murder of the two scouts. Mounted on the top of the drone was a red siren sitting within a ring of speaker slits which was inconveniently making a bloody racket just to underline the fact that he had messed up.

"Huh. Didn't see that coming," the veirheelu muttered as his finger started glowing blue. "These Americans and their security. Ridiculous. Shock bullet."

_Gzak!_ The drone promptly lost power as a sphere of lightning struck it, searing its casing and utterly frying all of its internal circuits.

"Tio, you may go ahead and shed your disguise. I think they're pretty sure we're not human by now," Doppler said irritably.

"Yes, Master," the devil said with an undeniable edge of relief. His body flared white for a moment, and then his silhouette within the halo of light grew substantially, turning the Nubian man into the vicious blue monster he was born as.

"Prepare for resistance," Doppler ordered. "There may be more to this complex than I thought..." 'And that will just make the reward that much sweeter...'

* * *

End Chapter 14 


	15. Enemy Territory

Artifact Recovery Progress Report

Archaeological project NN-72

Camp designation: Ice Vault

Location: 6 miles south of the Krasnoyarsk ruins, in Siberia

Transmission reads as follows:  
"Despite the remarkable progress we made early on in the project, we've faced increasing difficulties now that we've reached the third strata within the vault. I'm well aware that the security of this facility can't be compromised, and that there has been increased monitoring even in desolate areas like former Russia, but without more frequent shipments of tools and parts this entire project will rapidly turn into a five billion dollar camping trip. If you'll look at the attached surveys, you'll note that not one artifact has been recovered since my last report."

"Gretzkey says that the reason we're suffering so many breakdowns in our equipment is because of the magical energies saturating the chamber. I don't know much about it, but the theory is that the more magical power floating around our stuff, the more it messes up the physics and chemical reactions, which makes it hard for complex machines to work. It sounds kind of silly, but by now I believe it; there's one chamber in the vault in which NOTHING more complicated than a flashlight can turn on without fizzling. And usually the flashlights break down in under an hour. We've been making trips down there with oil lamps recently, but even lighting a match down there is harder. The other day, Jake's matches actually lit up on their own, without being rubbed against anything. Really freaky stuff."

"The vast majority of our equipment is broken, and half the time we can't even figure out why. Bad enough that our communications are so limited because of the secrecy and irregular magnetic fields, but none of our computers have been working reliably. The Commander's taken to having us back up our data on optical disks every night since magnetic storage keeps getting messed up. So here I am, writing notes on a legal pad like some kind of savage. If the stuff down here wasn't so amazing I'd be absolutely sick of this place."

"We can't afford to leave, though. The things down here... well, obviously, I don't know what to make of them, as I'm just the geologist and survivalist down here, but the others are really excited at what they keep finding, which makes the mood even more tense when we're stalled by technical difficulties. They claim that the jewel formations sealed in the crystal beds are some sort of information repository, and that some of the more arcane-looking stuff are actually unique tools. As for the crystal itself, that's what keeps me up at night; the stuff is as hard as granite and shows a bizarre capacity for self-replication, sort of like a living thing. Of course, all my best tools broke down long ago when I tried to analyze the crystal down in the vault, and my particular field hasn't been the one of primary interest to the Commander, so I'm pretty much stuck."

"There are two other issues which concern me, and have to do with security. One is that I've reason to believe that some items are being sold to a third party. I've no proof, but I've noticed on two separate occasions that artifacts that were scheduled to be taken off-location when our supply shipments come were separated from the rest of the items, with the explanation being that they were being held here for further study. This was suspicious all on its own, as it's increasingly hard to study anything at this base, and when I questioned the Commander, he said that the artifacts were, in fact, being shipped out. After the supply craft left, the artifacts in question were gone. Given my duties and responsibilities at the time, I was unable to determine whether the artifacts in question left as scheduled, and it's something that should be looked into. If we have someone leaking these kinds of items to somebody else out there, they need to be stopped immediately before we let something loose that we'll regret."

"Secondly, when the last relief squad came in to replace our guards, they were talking about a disturbing string of attacks on American research bases in the southern wastes. Granted, the Ice Vault is protected more by isolation and secrecy than by a fully loaded garrison like those other camps, but that also means that we have little chance of fending off an attacker if something does come our way. I advise an immediate reconsideration of our current safety measures. At present, we only have security drills and escape plans in place if the place is overrun by a zombie attack, a possibility which seems increasingly unlikely. A directed attack, however, could overwhelm us where hundreds of the undead would only prompt an elevated combat alert. I hope that you will consider shipments of additional troops and weapons for our next supply shipments before something bad happens."

- Warner Bram, secure transmission (Received two days prior to estimated facility shutdown)

Nexus II  
by Black Dragon

Disclaimer: I'd like to note, because it IS actually disclaimer-related, that while I borrow many things from the widely known and respected lore of Dungeons & Dragons, I am not fully versed in that particular multiverse, and thus will arbitrarily make things up when it suits me. To that end, please expect that magical law may not function as all you other nerds out there know it.

Words in " " are presented phonetically, or is the primary language in a scene (usually English, in this case). " " is spoken in a different language than the norm, not that it makes any difference if you're not reading this on my home site. Sounds are italicized, thought is in ' ', telapathy is italicized and in ' ' and writing is now ignored because hates me..

Chapter 15  
Enemy Territory

_Crrrrrrrreak..._

The quiet grind of the heavy metal doors opening up to reveal the excavation elevator was just barely loud enough to be heard over the crackling bonfires that dotted the shattered remains of the American research camp, testament to how carefully the vault's equipment had been maintained during its exploitation. And even now, when much of the facility was rapidly burning to cinders, the shining, metallic seal placed over the greatest treasures in the northern wastes was perfectly pristine, left unscathed by the swathes of destruction that scarred the camp.

Tio frowned as he tightened his muscles, and a brief surge of pain wracked his body before several bullets were slowly pushed out of the puncture wounds in his rapidly healing skin.

The devil took a moment to peruse the destruction, noting with satisfaction that all of Doppler's attacks had landed with surgical precision.

Or, at least, as surgical as he could have expected to be under the circumstances. There was plenty of room for error. The armory, filled with small arms, generic scouting equipment, and light gear had been utterly demolished. As had the food supply cabinets, where a marine had been taking cover before he was dissolved into a puddle by a jet of acid. And last but not least, the barracks were a rapidly cooling pit of igneous rock, bits of bone and half-melted metal articles sticking out among the ashes.

Yet barely a cinder had fallen upon the artifact supply closets, the tool shed, the generators, the field lab, the data repository, or the general sleeping quarters, where the scientists would have kept their personal notes.

The fence was also intact, which really didn't matter much except that it would keep any wandering zombies from stumbling into the place and getting their half-frozen guts all over the keys that would unlock the very secrets of the universe. Doppler had always been one to worry about the details.

The armored double-doors sealing the tunnel in the middle of the camp finished opening, and the single remaining human on the premises walked away from the control console, his gaze blank and listless.

Doppler waited patiently in front of the vault entrance, his top two hands still smoking slightly from the higher-energy spellcasting while his lower two dusted themselves off. "Tio, are you almost ready? The entrance is open."

Tio quickly trotted up to his master, idly ripping a chunk of canvas from the computer tent to wipe the blood off of his twin scimitars. "I proceed at your command, Master."

Doppler smirked and stepped back, gesturing to the human. "Well then, please, lead the way my new friend!"

Said 'friend' nodded limply and staggered forward before pulling a switch at the base of the vault entrance.

_Chung!_ A much louder noise than before heralded the ascent of an old pulley-based elevator that stopped dead with the elevator floor a good twenty feet below the entrance.

Doppler blinked as the brainwashed man slid down into a seated position on the edge, and then moved onto a ladder that the veirheelu hadn't noticed before.

"Are you serious? This relic is what you keep under that giant alloy shield? And you have to **climb** down to it?" He said critically as he himself hopped down and took hold of the ladder. "You really got shafted on the budget cuts, didn't you? I've seen pet shelters better equipped than this."

"Yes, Master," the scientist mumbled as he stepped onto the elevator floor.

Doppler snorted as he finished descending the ladder, annoyed by the response. He really didn't like the domination spell, despite it's power and variety of uses; there was simply no way to annoy someone whose only thought was to obey your every whim. Even the occasional amusing response was difficult to come by.

Tio hesitated as he looked at the flimsy-looking ladder that led down to the equally-flimsy-elevator, uncertain as to whether he should try coming along.

Doppler, wasn't nearly so concerned, and stepped clear of the devil's landing zone before gesturing to the blue demon. "Come on, hurry! We only have a few days to be here, and I'd rather not spend it waiting for you!"

Shrugging briefly, Tio finally sheathed the last of his weapons and then leapt straight down the tunnel, aiming for the center of the elevator platform.

Doppler's face darkened as he watched the blue mass plummet downward. "Hey, wai-"

_CRACK!_ The moment the devil touched the floor of the lift, it promptly bent under him, and the pulley wheel snapped straight off the girder it was attached to.

Doppler himself felt a moment of sinking weightlessness, which was replaced with ordinary weightlessness after he began levitating.

The demon mage glanced downward as his servants plummeted to the bottom of the cavern along with the primary mechanism for accessing the place. Apparently Tio was trying hard not to scream in surprise, as an amusingly shrill squeal was bouncing up through the tunnel, like a shout uttered through clenched teeth.

_WHAM!! CLUNK!! CRASH!!_

Doppler clicked his tongue as he floated straight down the chasm, one hand wagging his pointer finger.

"Tio, Tio, Tio... it's not like you to be so clumsy." He sighed as the devil groaned. "And LOOK. Now our guide is splattered all over the ground. I can't even land without getting muck on my shoes. Good show."

Tio didn't bother apologizing as he struggled to remove a beam that had stabbed into his leg, knowing full well that the demon mage was enjoying this more than enough to make up for the inconvenience.

As the devil recovered from his sudden spill, Doppler took a moment to observe their surroundings more closely. The main shaft split into four tunnels arranged in a cross. One tunnel, the northernmost one, dipped downward, and immediately attracted Doppler's attention; it was bleeding magical energy like nothing he'd ever felt before. And not raw magical energy either, but rather the gentle, refined aura of proper magical items. That he should be able to sense such things with his level of magical sensitivity was no surprise, but the way the energy simply POURED out of the hole like a flooded river was astounding.

In fact, the sheer power of what he sensed provoked a rare urge for caution in the inquisitive demon lord, and he began observing his immediate surroundings more closely.

'Hmmm... these crystals that make up the walls of the tunnel... they must have been broken down with the heavy drill outside, yet the surface is smooth, like it was... hmm...'

Tapping a finger against the crystal wall, a small, firecracker-like explosion cracked open the surface, allowing the veirheelu to remove a small shard for closer observation.

"These are... these entire crystals are composed of a magical pattern," Doppler mumbled, perplexed. The shard reminded him of the small projectile stones he created when he found occasion for using his Earth spells. Specifically, the ones that appeared on the ground, speared people, and then vanished without a trace.

Which was what happened when you tried to create solid matter from pure magical energy; it destabilized and was absorbed back into the ether. Magic could be used to extend or expand matter, transform matter, or move matter from other pockets of reality to the current one and retain some sense of permanency, so long as the magus knew what he was doing. But creating matter out of pure energy was a trick of mere seconds; essentially one simply fooled the universe into thinking one was God long enough to skewer or bludgeon the enemy before reality reasserted itself and undid all one's hard work.

But this, this crystal that surrounded him like any other mundane rock, was an exception. It glistened prettily, and was utterly unflawed, though it was hard to appreciate that when the walls were made of the stuff.

'Wait, completely unflawed?' Doppler turned the shard, observing the point that had suffered the direct force of his earlier cantrip. The edge, which had been crumbling and cracked - he was sure of it - was now clean and perfectly angled.

Looking back at the hole he had dug the shard out of, he was intrigued to find that the cracks were slowly, but visibly, sealing themselves up like healing wounds.

"Master, are we going to proceed?" Tio asked, dusting himself off as he stepped through the splattered remains of the human that had accompanied them.

"Remarkable," Doppler said simply before tossing the shard away haphazardly.

"What is, Lord?"

"Oh, just that this entire cavern is an impossibility, that's all," the demon mage said conversationally as he started heading down the northern tunnel, idly summoning a ball of light into his lower right hand to light the way.

The devil raised an eyebrow as he moved to follow, his heavy hoofs cracking the crystal floor underneath him with every step. "You don't sound terribly impressed."

"Yes, well, working with magic tends to leave you jaded toward these sorts of things," Doppler explained, clutching two hands behind his back.

"Hello? Nikolai, is that you?"

Both Doppler and Tio blinked and shared a glance as a voice echoed down the cavern, and they stared mutely as another human, this one wearing glasses and a rather unkempt beard, turned the corner they were about to head into, holding up an oil lamp, of all things.

The man stopped short, his eyes widening as his brain rapidly processed the ramifications of meeting a four-armed man and a large blue monster in an excavation site full of ancient magical artifacts.

The torn remains of a colleague littered about a large blood slick did well in confirming his guess as to where this was going.

"Aw, **SHIT**."

"No, no, not yet, please," Doppler said immediately, holding two hands up disarmingly as he approached. "I still have use for you alive, and I can't abide such smells."

The man immediately backed away to the wall. "Look, just kill me and get it over with! I won't help you!"

"Oh, don't say that," the demon chided as he continued to approach. "Then I'll have to dominate you, and all my cruelly flippant comments won't have any punch at all. I much prefer that you cooperate out of some absurd hope that I'll leave you alive."

As the mage carelessly stepped within arms' reach, the human grabbed a knife from his belt and lashed out desperately, hoping that he might be able to surprise the intruder.

He had no such luck, as Doppler's hand glowed briefly before grabbing the blade of the knife mid-swing.

"Yes, yes, and now you've had your heroic 'at least I died trying to fight back' moment. Can we get on with this, now? I really want to get a look at what's down in those tunnels."

Without another word uttered, the blade of the knife started to glow a sickly green, and both Doppler and the human let go of their respective ends of the weapon before it rapidly dissolved, hitting the ground as a puddle of glimmering silver liquid.

"I... I told you. I **won't** help you," the man said defiantly. "Even if I COULD."

Doppler raised an eyebrow. "Oh? You have no knowledge that could be helpful to me? What's your name, human?"

The man glanced over at the devil as the mighty blue-skinned demon stepped closer to the confrontation, though the beast remained calm and silent.

"I'm Warner Bram. I'm a geologist. That means no fancy technical knowledge, no theories about ancient civilizations that could have existed here, and no bloody clue what any of the 'magical artifacts' are supposed to be."

Doppler grunted in disgust and threw up all four of his hands irritably. "Well, that's just great. So much for commandeering the most deadly and ancient forces of the universe in time for Labor Day. Do you have ANY idea how much of my barbeque turnout was banking on my ruling the entire free world by then?"

Warner didn't respond to that, his near future far too grim to give even a regretful chuckle at the joke.

"Of course you don't. Idiot humans, always looking ahead into the future with your 'big picture'," the veirheelu mumbled as he stepped past the scientist. "You nerdy ones are the worst. Can't even plan out an enjoyable weekend of unleashing dark cosmic horrors upon an innocent and unsuspecting populace. Too busy tip-toeing around arcane powers beyond your feeble comprehension. Bah!"

With a sharp gesture, Warner suddenly found wisps of smoky darkness slithering up from the shadows and wrapping around his wrists. "Hey, what the-stop!"

"Don't wanna," Doppler said simply, pointing toward the human's feet.

To Warner's growing distress, more shadows appeared and wrapped around his ankles before he felt a none-too-gentle force yank one foot forward. The moment his foot touched ground again, his other leg was moved to follow, and soon the hapless scientist was being awkwardly forced to walk after his captor.

"Master, are you certain we need this one? Was he lying about how little he knows?" Tio asked, giving the human a bored look.

"That would be a 'no' to both questions, my friend," Doppler admitted, "but past experience has taught me that it's rarely a good idea to slaughter every helpless human in a base when your objective lies in recovering information."

The veirheelu turned toward the struggling human as his upper right arm gestured to the crystal walls. "So tell me, Mr. Bram, if you're a geologist, what's your opinion of these formations here?"

"Ergh! Shut up!" Warner growled, still trying to force his wrists apart, it was obvious that there was no actual mass to the strange shadow, but whenever he tried to tear it his arms would simply be pushed back by some inexplicable force.

Doppler sighed and then poked the geologist in the forehead. "Compulsion."

"The crystals seem to be part of an artificially created barrier," Warner said immediately, suddenly finding the information pouring out of him excitedly as a strange urge to share his work overwhelmed his common sense. "When we started digging, this entire cavern was a series of rock tunnels filled with solid crystal. We drilled through the crystal easily enough, but it seems like it's slowly trying to repair itself; a week ago these walls were barely two inches thick, and still shredded from the excavators. Now the surface is smooth, and the walls are almost a foot thick."

Doppler nodded and started walking again, looking around him as they trekked deeper into the tunnel. "Fascinating. Were you aware that the crystals are a stable mana complex?"

"I don't know what that means," Warner admitted promptly.

"Never mind, then. I'm sure you have better things to ponder right now than that. Continue."

He tried to stop himself, to clench his teeth, to bite his tongue, but some force beyond his control simply pushed everything but the excitement of his studies out of his mind. "The regenerative effect only seems to work in the Vault. All the carved-out crystal we brought topside disintegrated in a few hours, and we couldn't do anything to stop it. I did get to run a few tests, though. I found that they're very sensitive to high-frequency sonic emissions. Most long-wave bursts cause the crystals to break apart, but some short frequencies actually cause the crystals down here to grow faster, and in strange, partially controllable formations! Two days ago, I-"

"Okay, okay, you can shut up, now," Doppler said wearily, gazing down further into the cavern. "... But before you do, explain what's wrong with this area."

Indeed, the path ahead was much rougher than the rest of the tunnels, which had generally been very even and straight. This section was very uneven, with many crystal stalactites, and as the tunnel sloped down, the path rapidly became narrower.

"This is where all our drills keep breaking down... or exploding," Warner said ruefully. "We've actually taken to digging the rest of the way by hand. Personally, I don't think it's worth it, but most of the team disagrees."

"And just my luck that I've already killed them all," Doppler said regretfully as he stepped forward, lowering his head under a slender spear-like crystal formation hanging above. "Well... actually, I suppose luck had very little to do with it, huh? Oh well!"

Warner growled incoherently, bemoaning his fate. Every time Doppler spoke, he would go silent and regain control of his faculties, but at every command he was helpless to resist. He had heard about such spells before, but as he understood it they usually place the victim into a helpless, golem-like state, unconscious of what was actually happening. He couldn't help but wish he had the luxury of a coma right now.

Tio grunted as he snapped off a length of crystal that was in his way, though he still had to stoop down considerably to push himself through one particular passageway. "Why are these regions so narrow? Do you not have to bring equipment down here?"

Warner shrugged best he could as ducked his head down; to his annoyance, the smoky bonds that were forcing his movement weren't very careful about some of the longer crystal protrusions sticking out in his way. "Most of our equipment breaks down in this room when we bring it in. Also, the crystal walls grow back much faster. If we're not constantly digging it out, we can be trapped out of the inner sanctum completely in a day."

Doppler hopped down a smooth, glimmering slope that rounded a column of stone, and then blinked as he stepped out into a much larger cavern at the end of the tunnel.

"My, my... I believe this is what we're looking for..."

This area, unlike the others, had obviously been excavated exclusively by hand, and there were pickaxes and sledgehammers lying on the ground next to a number of candles. The digging appeared to have been slow and haphazard, with the express purpose of simply widening that area instead of tunneling further.

What was more interesting, however, was that the crystal in the walls of the cavern were much thicker, indicating that further tunneling had to be done. And what was most interesting of all was that Doppler could plainly see objects trapped in the crystal beyond.

"Tio! Human! Come here! Look at all this!" The magus shouted excitedly, brushing a hand against the crystalline barrier protecting the artifacts.

Warner growled as he was forcibly tugged into the opening, despite Doppler making it sound like a request. There were also a few grumbles for Tio, mostly because he had a hard time squeezing his huge frame through the entrance to the cavern.

"Magnificent! This is what we're looking for, all right!" The veirheelu cheered, rubbing his upper hands together. "Although... why are these artifacts still here? Haven't your people had enough time to extract them?"

Warner snorted. "Whatever's causing the crystal to regenerate is exponentially stronger the further we get toward this cavern; we had to keep someone on duty working at the walls twenty-four hours, or else the crystal growth would seal up the room again. It was actually my shift when you... joined me." He gestured toward one of the objects locked in the glimmering prison; a headband of some sort, although it was difficult to see through the barrier of translucent stone. "When we get close enough to that thing, whatever it is, it starts beating us back; we literally can't carve away the crystal faster than it grows back to protect it."

"Excellent," Doppler said ominously, steepling the fingers of his upper hands. "Then this will be my first prize."

With an incoherent whisper, the lower hands of the veirheelu started to glow a ghastly white, and the light sphere he had been sustaining floated off into the distance.

"You'll want to stay close to me!" Doppler shouted, his upper hands gesturing above his head.

Then he brought his lower hands together, the energy within building explosively before he threw his arms outward, toward the crystal wall. "Voln flare!"

And then, just as quickly, he brought his arms down just as Warner and Tio dashed toward him. "Dome of silence!"

A faint distortion in the air marked the edge of the spell as it encircled the trio, and it shuddered mightily as Doppler's other spell smacked into the crystal wall, bursting into blinding light show.

Warner didn't know what to make of it, though he'd later admit that he was glad to have lived through such an awesome experience (albeit barely). Absolutely no sound penetrated the bubble of energy around them, even as the entire cavern shook violently, causing Warner to waver back and forth despite the magical bonds holding his ankles and wrists in place.

And then, almost all at once, the crystal shattered. ALL of it.

In a beautiful cascade of destructive light, the wall of shimmering blue broke apart into chunks, which then cracked into pieces, which split into shards, and so on. In a bare second, before the crystals above the ground had barely had time to fall, the walls, floor, and ceiling of the cavern had become shiny dust.

Naturally, the walls and floor breaking apart wasn't that big a deal, considering there was a stone floor below the crystal. The ceiling... was more of a problem.

"Gack! Oomph!" _Bwoom!_ A small explosion blasted crystal dust into the air, and Doppler rapidly staggered to his feet, shaking his head to clear it of the fine, glittering sand. "My. I didn't expect the sonic flare to be THAT effective. Also, I should have remembered that the dome would do nothing to hinder shrapnel. Tio? Tio, are you all right?"

No response greeted the demon magus, and he frowned briefly before snapping his fingers.

"Right, right. I must have stumbled outside the shield. Dismissal." A green spark flared suddenly from his palm, and a mighty growl suddenly filled the cavern as a mound of crystal dust rose up from behind Doppler.

"GAAUGH!! Master! Master, where-"

"QUIET yourself, Tio," Doppler chided, turning around as the devil suddenly stumbled, having his hearing suddenly restored. "I am unharmed. What of the human?"

A shifting noise, now audible without the dome of silence, came from next to Tio's hooves, and the demon snorted before reaching into the layers of dust and pulling out their unwilling guide.

"Well, now. That was a bit crude, I admit, but effective. Thank you for your information on how to break the crystal down, Mr. Bram," Doppler said amicably. "Now that it's all been destroyed, it should disintegrate fairly rapidly. Which, conveniently, will make my collection of the artifacts much, much easier!" He turned around toward where he last saw the headband. "Now then, I'll... just... what?"

The source of Doppler's confusion was evident: Where before there was a headband locked in crystal, there was the same headband, mercifully free of its prison. The new complication, however, was that it was around someone's head.

Doppler cocked his head to the side, perplexed. Yes, there was someone new in the cavern now, lying on the floor in the fetal position. A human, by all appearances, with dark skin and straight, almost wire-like golden hair that reached the small of his back. He was just taller than Doppler, of average height for a human, and was decently muscular, though the demon wouldn't have pegged him for a fighter right off the bat. He was also naked, though that seemed far less important than how he had gotten here and why he had an ancient artifact around his head.

"Huh. Well, this trip has been just full of surprises, hasn't it?" Doppler mumbled. "Hello? Are you awake? You'd best regain consciousness and convince me that you're useful to me, because I already have an unwilling servant and those black snap spells aren't easy."

The newcomer did indeed stir, and slowly opened his eyes, revealing them to be a strangely prismatic hue. "Hnnnjl?" He mumbled.

"Pardon?"

The new human pushed himself up uncertainly, standing up straight and holding his head. "Ukl'eg opnoh j'hg'neeh? Zallam."

Doppler raised an eyebrow. "Tio, I don't suppose you recognize that language, do you?"

"I do not, Master," the demon said apologetically, "but if I had to guess, it sounds strangely like upper Lumenas, don't you think?"

Doppler shrugged. "I suppose the grammar seems to be the same if the inflection of the words is anything like-"

The mage was cut off as the dark-skinned man suddenly glanced toward him, the headband over his forehead glowing.

"Ah. I see. 'English' is the language? Good." He mumbled to Doppler, pressing his lips into a thin line before he looked down and inspected his body. "It seems I was well-preserved, at least."

Doppler cocked his head to the other side. "A spell to comprehend languages? So you're a magi of some sort?"

"A magi?" The man asked, turning back toward the demon. "I... Yes, I suppose you could call me that. I am a magi."

"Help me!" Warner suddenly shouted, struggling with his wrist bonds again. "You've got to stop this guy! He's-"

The scientist was silenced as Tio struck him lightly (as far as the devil was concerned) in the back of the neck, causing him to stagger forward and collapse onto the floor.

The newcomer was obviously disturbed by this. "What do you think you're doing? Why are you harming that man?"

Doppler sighed, and his fingers started crackling with arcane energies. "All right, all right, let's just calm down. First of all, who are you, anyway?"

The man stared at Doppler defiantly. "My name is Kais. You have that human magically bound. Release him at once!"

"No," Doppler said blithely. "So you're Kais? Just Kais? No surname?"

"No surname," Kais confirmed sharply. "You would invite my wrath?"

"Well, to be fair, you invited mine first," Doppler reasoned as lightning suddenly started wrapping around his arms and hopping from one hand to the next, creating an electric rectangle. "I mean, you just wake up and start barking orders like you're some sort of big shot. How do you think that makes me feel, hm?"

Kais' eyes narrowed. "I AM a big shot. Very big."

Doppler blinked. "Oh. Well, okay." He turned his head toward Tio. "Kill him."

Before Kais could do much more than yelp, the devil lurched forward, clasping one great, armored hand over the man's neck before slamming him into the wall of the cavern.

_Shnk!_ Tio's other hand slipped an oblong metal ring off of his belt, and Kais' eyes widened as a huge, glowing blue blade of energy emerged from one side (the side facing away from his knuckles, obviously).

Without hesitation or fanfare, Tio drove the weapon into Kais' gut, spilling a wash of hot, sizzling blood onto the cavern floor as the blade sliced through flesh, bone, and organs to stab into the rock face opposite the mighty demon.

"I know you just learned English, so you might not be aware of all the little cultural nuances to the language," Doppler explained as a sharp, crackling hiss filled the cavern, "but 'big shots' do not typically get themselves impaled by bodyguards. It leaves a poor impression. If not on your enemies, then on your spine, at least."

Kais gasped painfully, and acrid smoke started coming from his wound, but Tio noted with some discomfort a general lack of the usual pained thrashing or grudging acceptance that humans usually displayed when he ripped holes in them. This fellow was obviously in pain, but it looked as if he was readying himself for action rather than death.

"Devil... I have only just awoken..." Kais said in-between pained breaths, "and so... am trying to catch my bearings..."

Suddenly, his hand rose up and pressed against Tio's forehead, startling the creature. "I can't guarantee that this will be quick, and it CERTAINLY won't be painless."

'A spell? In his condition? How can he concentrate? How can he even BREATHE?' Tio attemped to drive the blade up into Kais' heart and squeezed the strange human's throat tighter, but it was too late.

_Fshassssssss..._ A brief flash of light heralded a strange, anticlimactic hissing noise, and Tio stopped trying to eviscerate his victim as he realized that Kais seemed far more confused at the ineffectual display than he was.

Kais raised his hand, smoke still rising from his fingers, and stared at it as if he had never seen it before. "Oh. Oh, no. I'm missing my arm."

"Not yet, you're not," Tio snarled, pulling his blade out and then throwing Kais face-first into the cavern floor.

_Whomp!_ The devil stamped one plated hoof onto Kais' back, prompting another short spray of blood onto the ground.

"Tio, halt," Doppler commanded as the devil raised his energy blade. "As much as I love the irony of that last exchange, he piqued my curiosity. Kais, what did you mean you were missing your arm?"

Kais wasn't listening to Doppler. Instead, he was looking around the room, searching for something among the slowly dissolving hills of crystal dust. And he seemed unusually calm doing so, considering his upper torso had a thirty-inch long laceration running through it.

On one side of him were several stones of power, along with several rings that used to have a crystal aligned within them; apparently whatever mechanism that had destroyed the crystal prison had destroyed the device that created it in the first place.

"Hello? Are you listening to me?" Doppler frowned, annoyed. "Tio, take off a leg. Apparently we're going to have to stab some manners into him."

"With pleasure, Master," the devil growled, raising his blade.

"Guh!" Kais gasped as he felt hot energy separate his leg from his torso mid-calf, and grit his teeth as he turned his head to scan the floor further.

On the other side of him were several rods and sharp, nastily serrated blades that were unusually dark for any metallic weapon. The rods, for the most part, were a small collection of exquisitely constructed wands and magic staves, most of them constructed of light, sheer white materials and decorated with intricate and obscure runes.

"Now this is getting ridiculous," Doppler grumbled, noting that his second prisoner still seemed more concerned with the trinkets on the floor than with his imminent dismemberment.

Tio snorted and grabbed Kais' remaining leg before lifting him up into the air, blood still spurting freely from the man's wounds.

Kais **still** didn't acknowledge his tormentors, his eyes instead locked onto something that was laying on the cavern floor behind him.

"Ah! There!"

Doppler raised an eyebrow as he stepped to one side of Tio to see what the strange man was staring at.

His other eyebrow rose once he saw the artifact that Kais was so interested in.

It was a black, left-handed gauntlet with a shining white gem set in the wristguard.

"What is this?" Kais said with increasing anger in his voice. "Where are the other pieces? This is all that is left?"

"Yes, that's a shame, isn't it?" Doppler deadpanned as he stepped past Tio toward the glove. "These humans are rather efficient in their-"

Right as the demon magus reached for the piece of armor, it suddenly rolled out of arm's reach.

"Eh?"

The veirheelu blinked dumbly as the gem in the wristguard gleamed brightly, causing the guantlet to tremble and the fingers of the glove to start twitching.

Doppler made to grab for it again, only for it to suddenly flip over his hands and land on its fingers before crawling, spider-like, toward Kais.

"Tio!" Doppler barked.

Without a word, the devil deftly grabbed the gauntlet out of the air just as it had leapt for Kais, clutching it far above the head of the flailing (and still bleeding) human. "Ha! It struggles like a living thing!"

Doppler nodded as he walked up to his minion, rubbing his chin as he stared at the guantlet. "Yes... I don't think that our friend here is actually controlling it, given the concentrations of magical energies, but rather this is a semi-autonomous object seeking to rejoin its owner." Chuckling, he leaned past Tio and called out, "Such a fascinating toy, don't you think, human?"

Doppler blinked. "Human? Are you there?" Not seeing the man immediately, he stepped past Tio and scanned the ground before scratching his head, confused. "He escaped?"

Tio immediately whirled around, ignoring Kais' yelping from being yanked about. "What? But, the spell..."

Doppler's upper left hand snapped its fingers. "Ah! The destruction of so many mana-resonant crystals must have destabilized the local ether flows. The spell decayed much more quickly than anticipated. Drat. If I hadn't dispelled the dome so quickly, I might have noticed."

"Shall I pursue, Master?" Tio asked, snorting acrid smoke from his nostrils. "The tunnel had a ladder access. If not stopped, he'll make it to the surface!"

"No, no, cutting down civilians does not suit you, my friend," the magus said, his lower hands moving intricately. "I have more expendable servants for such purposes. Summon Lesser Insect!"

In a dazzling display of lights, a tiny breach in the fabric of reality spat out a black, red-striped wasp about the size of a roll of quarters, not accounting for its legs and wings. As it landed on Doppler's outstretched finger, its tiny hooked jaws chittered eagerly, and a small, gleaming stinger that more resembled a sewing needle extended from its abdomen.

"Ah, perfect. This should do nicely." With a brief mental command, the goblin wasp (so named because the pitiful creatures were its favorite egg repositories and, by extension, most larvaes' first meal) gave a hiss and took to the sky, immediately zipping off toward the tunnel entrance.

"Why are you doing this?" Kais asked, breaking his long silence as he bled continually on the ground (Doppler was really starting to wonder where it was all coming from). "That man is no threat to you. And I imagine anything of value that he had, you've already taken. Leave him be."

"You seem to have a persisting problem," Doppler began, turning around. "You have this idea that you are someone to be obeyed. Or even listened to, really. This is in conflict with the reality of your current state of dismemberment, and exacerbated by your bizarre resilience. I recommend that you either cease talking entirely, or expire."

Kais crossed his arms over his chest as he considered the veirheelu. "Your manner of speaking... it's very complex and precise, even for a mage. Are you a scholar?"

Doppler pointed to Tio, who promptly twisted Kais' remaining leg. _Crack!_

"To answer your question," Doppler said as Kais grunted painfully, "around here people of my profession are referred to as 'scientists'. I'm considered to be of the 'mad' variety. As in, I'm rather 'mad' that you've lost an estimated twelve gallons of blood but still persist in whining about useless humans rather than giving me valuable insight as to your invulnerability."

Kais sighed wearily, then grimaced. "I cannot imagine that any good will come of my revealing my nature to you. I will regain my lost power and dispatch you quickly, then search for the remaining pieces."

"I must be honest: I don't see much in your current predicament that would promote such an outcome," Doppler deadpanned.

In response, Kais pointed to the gauntlet still squirming in Tio's grip.

_Fzash!_ The gauntlet immediately pointed its index finger at Tio's face, and a small bolt of light blasted out of it, striking the devil in the forehead and creating a layer of magic crystal over his eyes, nose and mouth.

This was startling enough that the demon released just enough pressure on the gauntlet that it could squirm free, leaping onto Kais' waiting hand.

Whatever the glove was supposed to do for the golden-haired man didn't happen fast enough, as Tio promptly swung Kais around by his broken arm, slinging him blindly toward the wall.

_CRACK!_ Doppler winced as the cavern walls shook from the impact of Kais' broken body, and then shook his head sadly.

With a muted growl, Tio balled one hand into a fist and smashed it into his face, shattering the crystal barrier obstructing his sight.

Kais slumped to the ground, convulsing slightly from the multiple fractures through his spine and shoulders.

_Hmmmmmmm..._ Doppler and Tio halted at the soft humming noise that filled the cavern, and Tio stepped back as a bright white light encompassed Kais, raising the human's body off the floor slightly.

After a second, Kais pushed himself into the sitting position as the light continued to surround his body, displaying the sudden recovery of his spinal column. "And now-"

"NOW, I think it's time you stopped resisting," Doppler countered, pointing one palm at Kais. "Domination."

A mere ripple around Kais' head was the only indication that the spell had been cast, the enchantment failing immediately as Kais raised his left arm, the gauntlet on his hand glowing with power.

_Shlunk!_ That arm promptly fell back down again as Tio sliced it off, and then the devil smashed his hoof against Kais' head, grinding it into the rock wall.

Doppler's eyebrow twitched as he continued looking at the severed arm, noting that the hand seemed to be continuing whatever it was doing, unabated. _Fzash!_

The veirheelu snorted at the patch of crystal blotting a section of his barrier, and once again gazed at the arm.

A bright white thread had appeared from the edge of the severed bone, which wound back up to Kais' bicep wound, and seemed to be actively tugging the extremity back to the increasingly battered main body.

'I can feel it... the guantlet has formed a link through the ether to the... the headband? Not the host body itself. Fascinating.' Doppler thought. "Tio, the guantlet. Take it."

_Kthunk!_ Tio stabbed a blade through Kais' gut and into the rock beyond, and then turned to make a grab for the piece of armor.

"Too late," Kais whispered, his eyes flaring a brilliant white.

A fierce, echoing howl filled the cavern as waves of force pushed Tio back, sending him stumbling across the stone floor, but failing to knock over the mighty demon.

Kais grunted as he tried to move, blood seeping from the implement lodged firmly in his abdomen. "You creatures... you should not be here."

A weak hiss issued from his arm as his bicep re-attached itself to the rest of his body, a pale mist pouring from the breached skin as it rapidly sealed.

"I will dispose of you..." The gauntlet on his left hand trembled slightly as strange, unknown energies emanated from the gem set in the wristguard.

Doppler snorted, stepping forward. "Your resistance to physical damage - or at least the ultimate result of organ failure and blood loss - is most impressive. You remind me of a young man I worked with once..."

_Fsh! Zwom!_ Bright lights suddenly danced in Doppler's palms as he spread his arms out.

"As you confessed to being a magi, you will meet a magi's death. Come. See your path to oblivion woven in the strands of the ether."

Kais flinched and raised his hand, several crystal shards appearing around him. "Zehruun glaftallim sierrn!"

"Lightning orb! Flash burst! Ionis crush!"

* * *

_ZRRRRRASH!!_

Warner winced as a strange noise, like metal being slowly ripped apart, poured from the Vault, and he took a deep breath before he steeled himself and continued gathering his notes, rapidly stuffing them all into a briefcase he had found under the remains of one of his colleagues.

While he truly regretted leaving the strange man down there to deal with the wizard and the devil alone, he had to make haste, or else he wouldn't live long enough to lament his selfishness. In addition to the pair of demons below (who surely must have noticed his absence by now), the earlier assault seemed to have drawn the numerous wandering undead in the area; even now, at least a dozen zombies stumbled around the exterior defenses of the camp, having been attracted by the unstable magics that Doppler had unleashed earlier.

Still, the geologist was willing to risk a slow, painful death being eaten alive in the wilderness to avoid a far more certain quick, fiery death at the hand of the veirheelu. "Here's Compton's synopsis... and Hilderman's... dear God, what am I going to tell his wife if I make it out of here?"

Despite his pained mumblings, Warner made good time in slipping the most important documents into the case before reaching for a pistol clip on the edge of the desk.

So consumed was the man in recovering his teams' work, that he never bothered to pay attention to the assortment of noises floating around the camp. Not that the soft buzz of a large insect's wings stood out well amongst a backdrop of subterranean explosions, overworked generators, and a cacophony of groaning zombies, but it was clear that Warner's senses had failed him as the goblin wasp accelerated toward its target, its abdomen curling to bring its gleaming stinger to bear.

"There!" Warner said breathlessly, snapping the briefcase latches shut before turning around. "Now I-"

_Thunk!_

Warner blinked at the noise, then looked down at the suitcase he was holding to see a freakishly huge wasp hissing and writhing against the surface of the leather exterior, its abdomen seemingly stuck in the side of the container.

Without a word, Warner promptly swung the briefcase over his head, bringing it down onto the table where he had been collecting his notes.

_Splack!_

Stopping briefly to scrape the ichor-splattered side of the container against the edge of the desk, Warner quickly pushed the minor assault out of his mind, heading toward the rear gate with his pistol in hand. At this point, he couldn't afford to be phased by such feeble attempts on his life, and he knew it.

'Either this information has to get back to the military, or it has to die with me out in the wilderness,' he thought, ignoring a pair of approaching zombies as he punched in an emergency code into the keypad outside the gate.

_Clank! Clank!_ The fence gate started sliding open, and one zombie stepped forward too quickly, slipping its hand into the metal links as the gate was dragged back toward the rest of the fence.

Warner shouldered his backpack timidly, ignoring the sound of breaking bone and tearing sinew as the mindless creature had its arm ripped off.

'This is it. From geologist to survivalist. I can't believe it's really come to this.'

Warner didn't dwell on his misfortune any longer and dashed out the rear gate of the facility, drawing his pistol as the second zombie lunged.

_Blam! Blam!_

* * *

Thousands of miles south, amongst the remains of one of Mongolia's border towns, a sweltering, oppressive fog hung in the air over the sundered and scorched buildings.

A band of scouts and guards, consisting of lizardmen and a few grend commanders, stalked the one clear road that lanced through the ruined settlement that had been cleared to facilitate shipping and ground patrols.

The patrols were ostensibly to prevent incursions of bandits, but of course the guards never encountered bandits on their patrols; any raiders foolish enough to venture too close to Greken's lands quickly ended up as dragon fodder from the more frequent aerial patrols. The patrols' more common function was to prevent people from getting out of Dashtall Greken's territory, not in.

As demon lords went, the dragon tamer was hardly among the worst of them, but there were still a great many people who would have traded the dangers of the wastes for the oppressive taxation and dubious protection of their lord. Small groups of refugees were inevitably harder to track than large, armed warbands, and usually had much better knowledge of the obstacles they'd face.

Due to recent troubles, civilian flight had become considerably more common; nearly all of the populace had noticed when a full flight of dragons had left the fortress with great speed and deliberation, and although few had noticed when only one of those dragons returned, rumor spread quickly. Had Lord Greken angered enemies who were a match even for him? It seemed unlikely, but the uncertainty only fueled thoughts of rebellion and escape.

Unfortunately for the hapless lizardmen and their larger cousins the grend, their species were built for survival and combat. Interrogations of the populace as to why it was rapidly shrinking were often quick, brutal, fruitless, and left the populace even smaller. Lizardmen did not excel at negotiation or subversion, and made poor torturers. That, combined with Dashtall's mistrust of non-reptillians, ensured that he had a difficult time putting together information to explain his rapidly diminishing tax revenues.

In the end, the grend warlord approached the problem with the type of brute-force approach that characterized his species; stepping up patrols dramatically to catch refugees fleeing the settlement. Not knowing the routes they used was a painful handicap, but in the end, he figured that numbers and persistence would shut down the flood.

One of the lizardmen hissed as he lowered his head, his eyes narrowing. "Ahead... I ssssmell blood."

The leader of the group, an imposing grend brawler clothed in modern body armor, stomped forward and snarled briefly, causing the other nine soldiers to get in a three-line formation behind him.

With the group double-timing down the street, the source of the scent became apparent; in a fairly open lot between two gutted brick buildings, a small skirmish had occurred between one of the other patrols and a single interloper, who now lay on his back in the middle of the lot with a scimitar lodged in his stomach. Despite his being dead, he seemed to have fared better than the patrol, whose remains were scattered about the area, some having been slice apart, some having been burned to death, and a select few having been smashed into the surrounding debris.

The grend's eyes narrowed as it scanned the corpses of its brethren, noting the complete absence of blood despite the very savage slashing wounds that had been inflicted. "Hmmm... check for tracks. See if any others escaped from here."

Two lizardmen nodded hastily and scampered off into the lot, dropping forward into a quadrapedal position to make it easier to check the area.

The grend commander stomped up to the man lying in the middle of the field, snorting in contempt.

The body was large for a human, and clothed in a long, brown coat that was uncommon in these parts of Asia. On his chest, a single emblem stood out: a series of three parallel slash marks cutting through a crescent.

"A Dread Knight? Here?" The grend mumbled, perplexed. What did the Third Brotherhood have to gain from border skirmishes with Dashtall?

As he observed the body more closely, an uneasy feeling started to overwhelm the demon. The dark paladin had his weapon sheathed, which was odd for someone that had been impaled through the front. Also, the wound seemed too fresh. The blood had barely started drying, which meant that he had been wounded mere minutes ago. Yet the patrol hadn't heard any fighting.

"Be on your guard!" The grend snapped suddenly, causing the others to lurch to attention suddenly. "There is something wrong-"

_Schlk!_

The grend commander whirled around just in time to see two of the lizardmen in the rear of the formation tumble to the ground, blood oozing from around the blades stuck in their throats. A single human figure, his hair in a unique style that seemed familiar to the commander for some reason, stepped back from the fallen creatures, his hand reaching for the katana at his hip.

The third lizardman at the rear turned and began to draw his scimitar at the same time the human grabbed his own sword, the difference being that the human drew much faster, slicing a lethal wound across the creature's neck.

With a feral snarl, the grend commander gripped his sledgehammer tightly as the rest of his men turned to engage the interloper. "Kill him! Kill him now!"

_Shlup!_

The sound of steel moving through flesh and organs was not entirely unexpected, though the commander really expected most of the noise to come from in front of him, rather than immediately behind him.

Turning hesitantly - for he was wary about exposing his back to the short human warrior - he saw the Dread Knight he had been inspecting push himself up to his feet.

Recognizing that he had fallen into a trap, the grend wasted no time, bringing his sledgehammer around in a brutal swing aimed for the swordsman's head.

_CRACK!_ The dark paladin's head snapped to the side as the weapon struck with perfect accuracy and considerable force, and the demon knight staggered for a moment.

But only a moment.

Before the grend could recover completely from his first attack, Rayden lurched forward and grabbed the demon's shoulder, holding his target firmly while he drove the scimitar (still wet with his blood) into its chest.

_Schlurkt!_ Scimitars were not made to puncture torsos, but Rayden's brute force made up for the blade's design flaw admirably, crushing the reptillian's sternum before ripping out of its back in a spray of dark blood.

Without another thought, Rayden swatted the gasping demon away with a negligent backhand, and then turned toward the lizardmen who had been searching for tracks as they leapt at him angrily.

Meanwhile, the two remaining grends and two lizardmen that had made up the formation following their commander charged the human, unaware of the tussle their leader had gotten into.

Ranma, for his part, leapt backward from the infuriated reptillians, smirking as they dashed after him into the street thoughtlessly.

At once a circle of runes glowing a bright blue appeared in the middle of the street, just as the four warriors stepped into it.

_Crackle!_ Arcs of green energy and silver sparks appeared at the reptilians' feet as their bodies were instantly paralyzed, the Judgment Circle meting out its punishment for the warriors' lives of oppressive brutality and murder.

_Shwip!_ One sweep of Ranma's hand saw two daggers embedded in the throats of each lizardman while his other hand reached for his pistol (as the grends' scales were too hard for mundane knives to pierce).

_Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam!_ Four rounds later, the grends were stumbling to the ground, bits of gray matter and skull fragments scattered amongst the cracked asphalt.

Ranma chewed his lip as the Circle trap faded away, its victims having expired. "Well, that was easy. These grunts are so dumb, using actual tactics almost seems unfair."

_Thock!_ Rayden punched the last remaining lizardman in the face, smashing the creature to the ground before he lifted his foot up and grinned savagely. _CRUNCH!_

Kaze stepped out of the razed building adjacent to the lot, K on his shoulder, and grimaced briefly at the gory mess adorning Rayden's boots before turning toward Ranma. "Master Saotome, should we not be searching for safe lodgings for the night? While these creatures are easily dispatched, if too many of them should venture here and not return, it is only a matter of time until a larger party is sent after us."

"Yeah, I know. But it's not easy," the pigtailed rogue mumbled. "They've obviously got a pretty good patrol pattern going if we found two of them within twenty minutes of each other. And camping out in the open with dragons flying about is suicidal enough when those dragons AREN'T actively hunting us." He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "Of course, even if we set up on a patrol route, Ray doesn't need to sleep, so he could handle the watch... but if a patrol DID find us, he'd make such a ruckus killing it that the entire army would know where we were."

Rayden started chuckling. "Heh! Yeah, I totally would, too!"

"I see," Kaze mumbled, mulling over Ranma's analysis. "Well, then, there is but one other matter that needs to be addressed." He pointed toward Rayden's stomach, which still bore a long cut from where the scimitar had pierced his flesh. "Was it absolutely necessary to **actually** pierce Shikodan with the enemy's weapon, instead of merely constructing a simple illusion?"

"Not at all," Ranma admitted. "Why?"

Kaze and K winced, and the latter stretched his neck out closer to Rayden. "I think he's still a little miffed about being booted off the sandship," the metadragon whispered.

"Gee, ya think?" The Dread Knight snapped back, rubbing at the dried blood that now decorated his coat.

Ranma snapped his fingers, bringing his lackeys to attention. "All right, we need to hurry. Ray, hurry up and feed your sword or whatever. Koz, I want you to do a magic scan for the closest village."

Kaze raised an eyebrow. "Is it wise to sleep in a settlement controlled by the enemy?"

"No," Ranma replied bluntly. "Which is why I won't be doing it. You two will."

Kaze immediately looked confused and rather nervous, and even Rayden hesitated as he was about to stab his sword into the ground to collect the battle's bounty.

"This Greken sap is after me and K, not you two. Hopefully he doesn't even know you guys exist, and if he does, he doesn't care. He can't have all his people on the lookout for everyone I've ever met. With just K to look out for, it'll be easy for me to get into the fortress undetected. You two, however, are about as subtle as a salamander in a fireworks factory, and it doesn't help that you're both carrying really powerful magic items."

Rayden and Kaze glanced at each other, both of them looking extremely uncomfortable knowing that they were a burden that had to be left behind.

"So, we can't even help? You just want us to lay low until it's all over?" Rayden said, a bit of anger creeping into his voice. He could understand Ranma not trusting him to keep to stealth - hell, he wouldn't trust himself not to get in a fight - but he didn't join up with the wanderer so that he could mulch soldier grunts and then sit on the bench when a real fight was brewing.

"I didn't say that," Ranma snapped, crossing his arms over his chest. "But right now I'm not sure what to do; I haven't seen the keep, and I don't know what we can expect if we trigger an alarm. All I know right now is that we really need to avoid bringing down the entire local army on our heads, and that's going to be really hard if we all stick together. So I'm going to lay low while you two take the bikes and head toward civilization." He turned to Kaze. "You got anything that would allow me to contact you when I've scouted the place?"

Kaze nodded and then rummaged about in the small rucksack he carried under his arm.

Ranma blinked as the evon held out a small, silver clamshell-shaped device made of plastic. "This is... you have a cell phone?"

"Of course," Kaze said. "I do not share the view of certain doddering old - mostly elven - magi that Earth Realm technology is worthless, unreliable alchemy to be shunned for older practices."

K's brow furrowed. "But... if you had a cell all this time... shouldn't you have called home to tell your church what happened to you? I mean, they still don't know you survived, right?"

"Are you out of your armor-plated mind?" The priest shouted incredulously. "Do you have any idea what the roaming charges for this thing is? We're over two hundred miles from the nearest service area! My family may be rich, but I live on stipends and gambling winnings!"

Ranma shrugged. "Well, whatever. This isn't really much use unless we have two of them, anyway. I was actually thinking something more on the magic side of things."

"Ah. I believe so..." The evon priest tapped his chin in thought, and then snapped his fingers. "Hold here. A few enchantments and we'll be on our way!"

Ranma nodded as Kaze scampered off into a roofless building where their supplies and bikes had been stashed. "Okay, get that done as soon as you can." Then he turned toward Rayden, frowning. "Look, Ray, I know you got in this for big fights and glory and all, but you're really going to have to tone it down until I get back in touch with you guys."

The demon knight immediately sunk into the most pathetic sulking expression Ranma had seen since he had been doused in holy water.

'Geez, he looks like someone shot his dog,' Ranma thought, sweatdropping. Not that he imagined Rayden to own a pet, or to get particularly depressed at its passing. "Okay, let's be reasonable about this. I know I'm asking too much if I try to keep you from getting into fights. That's fine. I won't ask. You're going to be off without me in enemy territory, so I just know you're going to see a target you can't pass up, or some bad guy is going to get on your nerves, or SOMETHING. All I ask is that you not fight any dragons."

Rayden looked slightly mollified at that, though he still didn't seem satisfied. "But they're all OVER the damn place..."

"I know, which is why I'm making this official," Ranma said sternly, crossing his arms over his chest. "I don't care if you squash a hundred lizardmen or grants or whatever the heck they're called. From here on out fixing those messes is up to you and Kaze. But I am ORDERING you, as group leader, not to fight any dragons no matter what. If you see a dragon, don't bother it. If a dragon attacks you, run away. Got it?"

The demon knight sighed. "FINE. If it means so freaking much to you, I'll let the scaly jerks live. For now," he snapped, sounding far more like a teenager conceding to a curfew than a proper paladin of either ethical persuasions.

"Good. With all the soldiers on full alert looking for me, hopefully nobody'll be looking to get in a scuffle with a Dread Knight," Ranma mumbled, scratching his head. He had no idea how far-reaching the reputation of the dark paladins were amongst demons, but he had to imagine that it was better established than among people like him. "But the idea here is to lay low until we're ready to attack. I'd really prefer that you stay in one piece until then."

"No promises," Rayden said tartly.

"All right, it's finished!" Kaze said, emerging from the ruined building while holding up a small green jewel.

"What is it?" K asked. Although he had been carried along and had seen the entire enchanting process, Kaze had refused to explain what he was doing, consumed as he was with actually doing it.

"This is a crude and unpopular psionic node that I've enchanted to link to me specifically," the priest explained happily, holding out the stone to Ranma. "Simply hold it in your bare hand and we'll be able to read each other's 'surface thoughts'. Specifically, the images and words that are foremost in our conscious minds at a given time. This will allow us to communicate telepathically over a fairly long distance."

Ranma blinked as he took the stone, though his gloves were still on. "Wait... 'unpopular'? What did you mean by that?"

Kaze nodded sadly. "It is well understood by psychics, and rarely considered by others, that knowing what other people are thinking all the time is more of a nuisance than an advantage. Frankly, it can be downright disturbing sometimes."

"You mean like if you're meeting someone who seems nice, but they actually hate you?" Ranma asked.

"I mean like if you're introducing someone to your mother, and they find her extremely attractive," Kaze deadpanned.

The others immediately recoiled, horrified.

"Wow, I... I hadn't thought of that," Ranma said uneasily, tugging on the collar of his vest.

"Few people do until it happens," Kaze said miserably. "Anyhow, the telepath jewel will only function for a few days before it loses power. Do make haste in your travels."

Ranma nodded. "I will. You guys be careful too. K?"

The little metadragon quickly leapt from Kaze's shoulder and landed on Ranma's as Kaze started rummaging in his sack for his divination tools.

"I'll contact you guys tomorrow morning, but I won't tell you where I'm making camp," Ranma said as he began to walk off. "Not that I don't trust you... well, I mean, I don't really trust you much either, but it's just not safe in general."

"Yeah, we get it. Have fun," Rayden said wearily, waving as the pigtailed man turned and dashed into the ruins. Almost immediately the demon knight lost track of him.

"Hmmm..." Kaze closed his eyes and concentrated as the Eye of Malakai floated before him, a vaguely-defined map of the surrounding area drawing itself outward from his position in his mind.

"Yes... I think I see a settlement... and the nearest dragon nest as well. Ugh. Far too close to each other for my tastes."

Rayden listened half-heartedly as he tugged one of the hoverbikes out of the rubble they had used to hide the vehicles. Then he stopped suddenly as a thought occurred. "Wait. Dragon eggs don't count as dragons, right?"

Kaze twitched immediately. He had heard Ranma's request, and agreed wholeheartedly with the sentiment of his orders. "Yes, of course they do."

"No, I'm serious!" Rayden said excitedly. "It's like how human babies don't count as people until they're born, right?"

"Last I heard, there was considerable debate on the topic, but that point is moot," Kaze explained sharply, trying to project an air of control despite being quite sure that he stood no chance of preventing Rayden from going where he pleased if the warrior insisted. "Raiding a dragon's nest will almost certainly end with you fighting a dragon. There's really no other way it could end."

"Well, maybe if-"

"While I can understand and even admire your persistence in finding a way to bend the rules and do what you wish, I really must ask you to reconsider," Kaze said hastily. "I may have trekked here willingly, but I've had quite enough of fighting dragons. Of course, in this environment, I'm quite certain that leaving you and wandering off on my own would be only slightly less suicidal than letting you lead us into conflict. For MY sake, please, let's just head for the village and spend the night there."

Rayden frowned, looking unconvinced.

"Look, we'll find you something to kill without making too much fuss when we get there, all right?" Kaze said, sighing.

The demon knight crossed his arms over his chest. "Promise me."

"Only if you promise to fulfill Master Saotome's orders as best you can," Kaze demanded.

The pair shook hands firmly, and then turned to get on their respective bikes.

'A bare two minutes of being in charge, and already the responsibility is trying. Saotome is a strong man indeed,' Kaze thought, slipping onto the seat of the hoverbike as it bounced gently above the shattered concrete below.

As the priest gazed at the various blinking lights and switches, a thought came to him. "Uh... Shikodan, it suddenly occurs to me that I rode double with Master Saotome on the way here. I'm not entirely sure how to work-"

_SHWOOM!_ "YEEEEEEEEHAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!" The priest was almost knocked off his vehicle from the backwash of Rayden's passing, chunks of debris being lifted off the ground and flung straight upwards in the wake of the abusive anti-gravity fields.

"_Sigh._ Now I remember why I was so willing to take on the role of hapless student when I met Saotome in the first place," Kaze mumbled as he started toying with the controls and hoping for positive results. "Certainly leadership is no place for me, avatar or no. How in Kleimjun are you supposed to start this thing?"

_Click!_ The next switch he flipped activated a bright red light, and a promising whine started to come from the engines of the vehicle.

What, exactly, the sound promised was up for debate, as well as whether it would be beneficial or not, but Kaze was really getting tired of sitting around in place.

_WhoooooooooOOOOOOOOORRNNNN..._

Kaze frowned as he glanced back at the engines, which were trembling as the energy built up within their cores, eager for release. "Well, this is hardly getting me-" _SHWOOOOOM!!_ "GWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa..."

* * *

"Master, are you certain we should have left? Surely we could have slain the fool with time and patience."

The words emerging from the hybrid devil's mouth didn't seem to stir Doppler as he stalked through the ice-laden forests of Russia, his hands gripped into fists and all of his arms held ramrod straight.

Compared to the demon mage, the armored brute following him seemed to be the very picture of reason and sensibility, gently recounting the encounter and proposing the solutions he thought appropriate.

"Though his unique regeneration was powerful, we never did try beheading him," Tio noted, raising his index finger to accentuate his point. Tio didn't like beheading people, mostly because he was large and used heavy swings that were meant to cleave through large, armored parts of the body rather than striking small, vulnerable points.

In response to Tio's helpful suggestion, Doppler slashed one hand upward, and a zombie that had strayed within the magi's line of sight staggered for a moment before a thread of light suddenly lanced down from above, straight onto its head.

_THWOOM!_ In a split-second, the thread of light became a pillar of energy that smashed the hapless corpse into a fine, salty dust coating the bottom of a small blast crater.

Tio sighed. "Master, please..."

"Tio, this is not a matter I care to further analyze," Doppler said irritably as he crossed his lower arms over his chest. "That... That THING was no magi. At least, none of a sort that I've ever encountered."

The "battle" had been embarrassingly short and far more one-sided than the demons could have hoped. Within minutes Kais had been scorched, blasted, pummeled, and sliced apart by the perfect coordination of Doppler's spells and Tio's punishing brutality.

Yet the man had continued regenerating, his body pulling itself together, bones pushing themselves back into place, and skin sealing before their very eyes. Although the pair could cause damage far more quickly than Kais seemed able to heal it, nothing had proven able to push the mysterious human beyond the barrier of life and death. Acid had eventually neutralized, fire had eventually abated. And still, the man would not die.

It didn't help that all of Doppler's higher-order spells refused to touch the man, either. While normal evocations worked wonders on Kais' bare, naked flesh, he had otherwise proven completely impregnable to enchantments, transmutations, dimensional rifts, and every half-decent necromancy he could come up with.

"After all that, to trap himself in some sort of barrier... hmph!" Doppler had spent a full ten minutes analyzing the cloudy glass-like shell that had entombed Kais before he'd finally stomped out in a huff, leaving Tio to quickly gather up the artifacts on the cavern floor. Patience was a common virtue among magi, but Doppler was a busy demon, and had many other plots, betrayals, and cruel experiments to bring to fruition.

The magus was equally frustrated to find that the body of his former unwilling guide was nowhere to be found among the dead in the camp, and that the back entrance was open. Incidentally this also let a wave of zombies into the camp to feast on the dead, raise more of their own, and in general make nuisances of themselves.

Finding out that the human was not only alive, but had stolen away most of the notes, left the demon lord absolutely furious, which was why he and his most favored servant were now engaged in the most un-lordly task of tracking a fleeing human through the snow.

"I really wish I had bothered to remember that fool's name," Doppler mumbled, staring up at the snow gently falling from above. "A quick divination would make all the difference right now."

Tio grunted unintelligibly, and then crouched on one knee, staring at the ground. "Hmmm... Master, if his tracks are still here, I can't find them. The zombies drag their feet about wherever they go, and they seem to be congregating in this area; any tracks he's left have been ruined." Not that Tio would have been able to track very well otherwise. His upbringing had involved more language studies than survivalism, frankly.

Doppler growled fiercely for a moment, and was promptly shocked still when he heard growling come from a nearby bush in return.

The demon mage was preparing a small fire spell to eliminate the threat when it emerged from the bushes, immediately giving him a possible solution to his current predicament.

"Gggrrrrhhh..." emerging from the bush was an undead wolf, half its ribcage exposed and its rotting organs spilling out its side. Its legs were mangy and coated with blood, while its maw was cracked and the jaw closed unevenly; evidence that this particular creature had fought since being raised.

Doppler grinned, and let his fire spell dissipate as his upper hands worked a different pattern. "Control undead."

Before the zombie wolf could get anywhere close to lunging range the spell hit it, promptly linking the masterless drone to the demon mage. It immediately stopped advancing and sat down in the snow, awaiting orders.

"Perfect. And this time, I'll follow the mindless servant to make sure it finishes the job." Stepping closer to his new, rotting slave, he stopped about a foot away and pointed to a mess of crushed snow below him. "There! There is a human that traveled along this path! Follow it!"

The wolf let out a gentle whine from deep within its dry, bloodied throat, and then glanced to the right and the left before it went back to staring at Doppler.

The demon mage raised an eyebrow. "What's wrong? Take his scent!" Doppler demanded.

Seeing as the zombie continued to do nothing but stare (its tail twitched slightly in a weak imitation of a wag, though), Tio frowned. "Master, do you think a basic zombie such as this has the intelligence to retain and differentiate smells?"

Doppler frowned as well. "Hmmm... I don't know, honestly. Undead are hardly my usual field of study." Then he glared down at the dead canine, pointing down sharply once again. "Find the human! I don't care how you do it, find him and kill him!"

The zombie wolf cocked his head to one side, and then stood up, walked closer to Doppler, and licked his hand happily.

_Snap!_ A vein popped up on Doppler's head as he raised his hand, which was now wet with filthy, gooey puss full of clumps of dry blood.

_BWOOOM!!_

Tio winced and turned his head away, grunting slightly as a few smoldering chunks of wood that used to be a full tree bounced off his back.

"Come, Tio. Back to the camp," Doppler demanded sharply, stomping away from their previous route (and the blast crater) into the forest.

"We're giving up, Master?"

"Yes," the veirheelu snapped. "I was ill prepared for this scenario. We will depart for the research base immediately, and gather what resources they have remaining. This operation has fallen far short of my expectations... but these things happen, and all told, we gained much and lost nothing here," he reasoned.

Then he stared at his hand in disgust. "Except perhaps our dignity."

"I'm sure you'll find a way to conjure dignity magically if the need somehow arises," Tio deadpanned.

"Hmph. Let us make haste back to the camp and clear the undead filth from its grounds. This entire exercise is already taking far longer than I'd imagined..."

* * *

"Ssssah! Faster! Faster!" The grend snarled, waving its scimitar in the air threateningly as dark-scaled lizardmen with leather armor and spears marched by, their bodies bent into a near-crouch and their heads bobbing low to the ground in their rush.

"Two patrols failed to return today! Sssssss... find the rebels! Raze the town AGAIN if you have to! I want no rock unturned! Find them and kill them all!" With a feral snarl, the reptillian banged his weapon against his shield to further rouse his troops.

"SSHRREEEEEEAUGH!!" A great scream echoed from far above, and the sound of heavy wings flapping heralded the arrival of a mighty fire drake being flanked by two wyverns that tailed it at a respectful distance.

The grend hissed in satisfaction as he gazed upon his force, and then jumped into the middle of the lizardman formation, eager to take his men to the fight.

"Huh. Pretty good response time for a military without any radios OR magic," Ranma mumbled quietly, crouching on a tree branch well away from the road as he chewed on a wad of jerky that Rayden had made from some of the leftover dragon meat.

"Yeesh! You've got to be kidding me!" K said as he watched the serpents overhead fly into the distance. "After all those losses to the IEF, they still have dragons sitting around to send on worthless missions like that?"

"Well, it was too much to hope for that he sent his entire army to its death," Ranma reasoned. "But it doesn't matter. This was never about fighting his army, however big it still is. We're here for the big lizard himself."

K frowned as Ranma hopped down from the tree, and slowly hovered down to land on his shoulder. "Speaking of which... what exactly are you going to do here? You can't take on the army that's hunting you, so... what? You're going to just kill Greken and hope it all ends?"

"That's Plan B," Ranma said as he dashed through the high grass that dominated the landscape surrounding the roads. "This was never a straight assassination mission. I need to figure out what this guy wants from me, and why. Then I can figure out if just killing him is going to do the trick."

"So, wait, you're going to talk with him? And give away the element of surprise?" K asked. That didn't seem like a good idea. Or at least, no better than just killing the demon lord outright.

"Yeah, well, contrary to what Rayden thinks, sometimes killing your enemy creates more trouble than it stops."

Suddenly, Ranma dropped down onto the ground, obscuring himself beneath the grass as the beating of leathery wings once again filled the air.

"We're isolated in the middle of enemy territory, and I'm basically stuck with allies I can hardly rely on. I don't know any of the civilians around here, and the patrols seem to be a lot more intent on keeping people IN than keeping invaders out. Barring an incredibly convenient undead invasion like last time I fought a demon lord, I can't see myself getting away very easily." It had also helped that Saffron's army and territory were both relatively small; escaping from a mountain was one thing, but Dashtall's territory was measured in villages, not acres, and as always the threat of being assaulted by dragons was the paramount concern.

Ranma waited until the sound of the dragon's flight faded away, and then poked his head up above the grass, scanning the area before he moved on.

"If I just kill this guy, the best I can hope for is not being chased IF I manage to escape afterward."

"And if you talk to this guy, the best you can hope for is... what? That he puts everything on the line in a dramatic, one-on-one duel instead of just having you captured and executed?" K retorted.

"It happens more often than you'd think."

Ranma suddenly turned, startling K briefly as he approached a rock outcropping.

"Okay, this'll do for the night."

K recoiled. "What? This? This isn't going to hide you! These rocks are hardly bigger than you are!"

"Which is just the right size when you're going to be burying yourself under them," Ranma clarified.

K watched, fascinated, as Ranma fiddled with his left sleeve for a moment, and then swung his arm out.

_Shkng!_ The metadragon gaped as a full-sized **halberd** suddenly slipped out into Ranma's waiting hand, the head of the weapon seeming to simply materialize as the polearm's shaft slid down out of Ranma's sleeve.

"Oof! Damn... never tried it with something this big before," Ranma complained as he started pulling the shaft the rest of the way out of his sleeve. "I should probably try to keep the weapons shorter, I guess. This would be too hard to handle in an actual fight."

"Whoa, wait, hold it!" K shouted, shaking his head wildly. "What the hell? Where did that thing come from? How did you do that?"

Ranma raised an eyebrow as he finished pulling the haldberd free of his clothes. "Well, I'm not sure if you've noticed, but I've been carrying more and more weapons on me since the Amazon village, you know?"

"W-Well, sure, but... those were like, knives and stuff!" K protested.

"Well, obviously I have to start with easy things," Ranma explained, planting one hand on his hip. "Throwing knives, wakizashi, wood axes..." At seeing K's incredulous stare, Ranma shook his head. "Look, the short of it is, I saw that crazy Mousse guy use this to summon weapons from his clothes, and it looked really useful. So ever since then I've been experimenting with the technique."

Walking past the baby dragon, Ranma jammed the halberd's spiked head down into the dirt next to the rock, and then lifted out a large wad of dirt, using the polearm as a shovel.

"At first the best I could do was keep knives up my sleeves without hurting myself when I was moving, but with a little practice, I found that I could sort of fold knives over knives... well, that's a weird way of saying it, but basically I could hold as many knives as I wanted, and they wouldn't weigh me down. It was a lot harder to do with weapons that aren't made to be concealed, but I'm doing okay. I can fit a few battleaxes and like one long weapon on me, but if I try to add any more big ones I start feeling the weight build up, and there's a lot of tension in my clothes, like they could just tear apart at any moment. So I'm kind of thinking that I don't really need to work on it anymore; it's not like heavy weapons are even my thing, right?"

"R-Right..." K said weakly as Ranma continued digging out the shelter to a respectable size. "When did you learn this stuff, though? Between the killing and you almost getting laid, we were hardly in the Amazon village at all!"

"Well, it wasn't easy," Ranma admitted as he leaned down to check the dimensions of his shelter. "But when I met Rayden and noticed that he could fight without breaking all the whiskey bottles in his coat, I knew I was on to something. After observing him for a bit, I had the basics down." He stood up again and started cleaning up the outer edges of the hole. "He only used the technique for keeping his liquor in one piece, though. And I don't know if he even does it consciously. I had to practice hiding the weapons we find after a fight a lot to reach this level."

"What? You've been taking the extra weapons?" K asked. "I didn't know that."

"Yeah... taking things without anyone noticing is a skill I picked up way before I met the Amazons," Ranma said dubiously. Then he stepped away from his shelter, wiping his brow. "That'll do. A bit dirty, but with the rock on top it should be safe."

K's head was still spinning slightly from the previous conversation, but he managed to push Ranma's bizarre storage technique to the back of his mind. "Okay, so... what now? Are we turning in already?"

Ranma shook his head, and then stabbed the halberd into the ground. "No, not yet. There's a different technique I've been trying out the last few nights, and... well, I was hoping you could help."

K winced immediately. There weren't many ways in which he could imagine helping Ranma in his training, and most of the ways he COULD imagine placed him as the target. "Uh... is this going to hurt?"

"No, no, it's nothing like that," Ranma said reassuringly. "Just... keep a sharp eye out, all right?"

* * *

_SssssssssSSSSSSSHOOOOOOOOOOM!_

The sound of overworked turbo booster screamed across the landscape as two gleaming vehicles shot across the plains like silver missiles, clouds of dust and small debris rising in their wakes.

The one in the rear, though it seemed to jerk from side to side a bit unsteadily, had slowly gained on its partner over that last few dozen miles, and its pilot grit his teeth in frustration at the poor progress as his long white hair whipped about in the wind.

'Just a little closer...' Kaze thought, trying desperately to steady his craft as it bounced a little higher because of some rocks strewn on the ground.

'_There! Shikodan! Shikodan, can you hear me?_'

Rayden blinked in surprise as he suddenly heard... or rather, **felt** a gentle whisper in his mind. "Eh? Who's there?"

'_It's me, Kaze! I normally try to restrain my use of telepathy, but with the distance between us and the NOISE these things make, I hardly have a choice! Listen, would you slow down?_'

"Slow down? Why?" Rayden asked, shouting against the wind despite the message being telepathic.

'_Well, for one thing, these devices make an incredible racket! We've already been spotted by four patrols, and we barely lost that last wing of wyverns before they got us!_'

"Well, sure, but we DID lose them!" Rayden allowed, turning and tilting his vehicle sharply to aim the anti-gravity units on the bottom at a rock crag sticking up out of the ground. The hoverbike promptly went air borne, sliding sideways over the length of the spike and launching into the air. "YEAH!! I love this thing!"

Kaze twitched as he zoomed past the crag, and then began the slow and nerve-wracking process of turning around. '_Well, there's also the fact that we passed the village we were headed toward._' Thanks to the depth of the telepathic link, Kaze was able to put a satisfying amount of irritation into the sentence.

Rayden blinked as his vehicle came crashing down to Earth, bobbing barely an inch from the ground before it bounced up again over a fresh cloud of dust. "Oh. Well, we should turn around, then."

'_Yes, we should,_' Kaze thought-deadpanned. '_Also, I have been thinking of how we will approach the settlement, given that we've been spotted already, and will inevitably cause quite a stir amongst the locals, if not the guard. I believe I've found a solution._'

By this time Kaze had managed to turn the hoverbike back toward their destination, and Rayden promptly accelerated after the white priest to follow, rather than taking off with the turbos like last time.

"Okay, so what's the plan?"

'_I plan to make use of our status within our respective churches. I don't have time to relay all the details, but our cover story will be that we're on a diplomatic mission for our factions, and have chosen this village as neutral territory for our negotiations._'

Rayden nodded, though the gesture obviously didn't make it through the telepathic link.

'_All right, there's the gate up ahead. When we get there, let me do most of the talking and follow my lead. And don't forget, we're on a DIPLOMATIC mission, so please restrain yourself from killing-_'

_WHAAAAOR!_ Before Kaze could continue that thought, Rayden kicked in his turbos once again, blasting forward in a burst of blue energy and displaced Earth.

"There! Do you sssee it?"

A massive grend, his small, beady eyes shielded by a protruding, bony ridge, shook his head as he stared out onto the plains. "Don' worry 'bout it," the creature said gruffly, turning away. "The patrols're out 'n force. They'll get anyth'n at's out there."

The lizardman who had noticed the distant glint reflected from the waning late-afternoon sun glanced at his commander's back nervously, a pike held tightly at his side.

The village was rather well-fortified for such a small settlement, with a tall wooden palisade and hefty iron gate at the front supported by a pair of watch towers (unmanned most of the time, as reptilians usually made poor marksmen, and machine gunners were fairly rare). All around the road leading up to the gate were several wooden stakes set in the ground with human bodies and the occasional non-human raider impaled upon them; a warning both to those who would seek to invade, and to those who would flee.

"Wait! There it isss! I can make it out, now!"

The grend commander groaned at the nervous yapping of the smaller creature, and turned around laboriously before stomping back to his subordinate.

"What. What do ya-" the demon stopped as he immediately noticed a cloud of dust in the distance that seemed to be rapidly approaching the settlement. "Wassat? We got raiders?"

Another lizardman hissed and leapt up onto the wall of the palisade, clawing his way up and over to perch on the top for a better view. "Sssssss... no, it's jussst one..."

"Jus' one **what**?" The grend demanded. At this point the approaching object was big enough that he could see a spot of silver at the head of the dust trail.

"I don't know," the first guard admitted, lowering his head nervously. "But it approachesss very fast, yesss?"

The grend snorted irritably, his mind straining itself to absorb the situation. Something unknown was approaching very fast. It could be anything. Unknown things often proved to be dangerous. Dangerous things were usually handled by the town guards. He was currently in charge of those guards.

As his brain cells finally handed down their crowning achievement of the past week, the commander opened his mouth to speak.

_Svooosh!_ By that time, of course, Rayden had already covered the rest of the distance to the gate, and once again turned his hoverbike sharply while tilting it heavily, exposing the anti-gravity system to the palisade wall and the two reptilian guards unfortunate enough to be between the two.

The dark paladin immediately hit the jump booster for the bike, normally used to vault the hoverbike off the ground over obstacles by feeding a surge of power into the anti-gravity field. In this case, with the vehicle nearly on its side and still zipping toward the lizardman and his commander, it used the burst to suddenly kill its momentum, stopping the bike dead.

Unfortunately for the creatures on the other end of that equation, magitechnology never had managed to neuter ALL of Newton's pesky laws.

_BWOOSH!_ "SEEEEEAAAAAAH!!" _CRUNCH!_ The grend grunted as the breath was taken out of him, his thick skin and hard bones resisting much better than the lizardman that had plowed into him, being crushed into a bloody mess from the impact.

Rayden promptly jerked the hoverbike back upright, feeling immensely satisfied with the manuever, and feeling confident that he could win at least a few of the many hoverbike races that he planned on challenging Ranma to in the future.

"I don't even know what Ranma's problem is," he said to himself as he stepped off the vehicle. "These things are WAY better than laying around that stupid IEF cruiser."

Grinning to himself, the Dread Knight turned toward the gate.

_Shnk! Clank! Clink! Sh-tang!_

He was nonplussed, though hardly surprised, to see half a dozen polearms aimed at his neck, and one very grumpy-looking grend stomping toward him.

"Wow. Four seconds, and I'm already surrounded by angry guards. That's pretty good, even for me," he said in a deceptively amiable tone as he started cracking his knuckles

The guards were mustering their courage to attack the intruder when the sound of a second hoverbike approaching arrested their attention, each of them afraid of being blasted aside like their comrade.

"Shikodan! Now look what you've done!" The lizardmen backed away uncertainly as the second hoverbike decelerated quickly, coming to a gentle stop immediately behind the strange warrior.

"Who're you? Wha's goin' on here?" The grend demanded, quite confused, his voice even more shrill and breathless from the earlier impact.

Kaze stood up on top of the floating hoverbike, and then stepped off of it, descending toward the ground as if he was walking down invisible stairs (hardly the most efficient use of a levitation spell, but it left a good impression). "I really MUST apologize for dear Shikodan's behavior; he can be MOST inconsiderate at times."

The grend's forehead scrunched up as he tried to reconcile crushing a guard with being "inconsiderate".

Before the demon could finish that calculation, Kaze stepped up to him, shaking his head. "Oh, and you're hurt, too! Really Shikodan, would it trouble you so much not to use sentient creatures as braking mechanisms?"

"Probably not, but that's like the best part!" Rayden retorted, causing the guards to wince.

Kaze's hands started glowing a vibrant white, and he held his palms close to the grend's chest as healing energies went to work knitting cracked bones and ruptured scales. "I'm sorry for your loss, but I ask that you please excuse his rudeness. We do have a good reason for being here."

"Who are ye two?" The commander snarled, though he seemed to relax slightly at Kaze's words (not to mention the healing magic).

"Ah, of course. Introductions." Kaze stopped healing the grend and backed away before bowing. "My name is Kaze Toren, avatar of the Order of Malakai."

The response was instantaneous. The lizardmen hissed sharply in surprise, and immediately stood their weapons upright, not wanting to offend or provoke an individual of such status. Rank was a concept that had a lot of sway in their culture, and nearly overshadowed the fact that Kaze wasn't on their side.

Kaze promptly gestured to Rayden, who was withdrawing a bottle of beer from within his coat. "This is Rayden Shikodan, avatar of the Third Brotherhood, the cult of Kharak."

The results from that admission were just as obvious. Two of the lizardmen actually dropped their weapons and knelt, suddenly aware how close they had come to having their heads smashed in. The rest seemed to hold on to their dignity, but they were trembling and gripping their weapons tightly, hugging them closer to their bodies.

The grend was slightly less impressed, but even his dull intellect could piece together that these men weren't to be dealt with callously. "Why're two AVATARS snoopin' aroun' here? 'Aint nothin' here but farms 'n dragons."

"Well, yes, that's why it's perfect for our purposes," Kaze said happily, stepping past the grend and idly kicking aside the dead lizardman as he stepped up to the gate. "You see, we're on a diplomatic mission to settle a territory dispute amongst our two churches, and required neutral ground to hold the meeting. Greken's land is conveniently located between our respective cathedrals, and possesses... **exhaustive** security measures. So naturally, we decided to hold the negotiations in your fine village here." Of course, Kaze didn't know if the Third even HAD a cathedral on Earth, much less where it was, but he had long found that it was easy to cram little lies and bits of misinformation into a patchwork of truth.

Then the priest rubbed his chin. "Surely you knew we were coming, didn't you? We sent several messengers to inform Lord Greken of this matter. Did something happen to them?"

The lizardmen winced and glanced at each other nervously. A messenger speeding across the landscape probably would have been spotted by the patrols, especially if it was headed to the capital. And the only people that the patrols were ordered NOT to kill were traders, who were merely harassed and searched for refugees on their way out.

And even then, the dragons could be quite indiscriminate when they got hungry.

"Uh... right... the messenger. I'm... sure e's just runnin' late," the commander said weakly, rubbing his head. "Well, since ya came all 'is way, least we can do is make yeh comfortable." He promptly turned and gestured sharply to a lizardman standing on the palisade, who promptly leapt down to open up the gate.

"Ah, thank you very much for your hospitality," Kaze said pleasantly, smiling as the gate slid upward in front of him. "Please have your men bring our vehicles to a clear empty lot, pull the ignition key from the dashboard, and then return the keys to us."

The lizardmen nearly tripped over each other in their rush to comply, dropping their weapons while scurrying toward the vehicles.

Kaze idly adjusted the clasp on his robes as he continued. "If you have a moment, I'd like you to lead us to an appropriate inn; preferably one that doesn't cater to you and your men. We prefer human food. Also-"

_BLAM!_ One lizardman's skull popped like a balloon just as it was reaching toward Rayden's hoverbike, and the body wobbled upright briefly before it tumbled forward.

Rayden aimed his bolt pistol at the next closest guard, smoke still wafting from the barrel. "Don't touch the bike. I'll park it myself."

Kaze sweatdropped. "You could have said that back when I asked them to move it."

"Meh." Rayden shrugged and gulped down the last quarter of his beer, then tossed the empty bottle over his shoulder, bouncing it off another guard's head. Then he grabbed a latch on the side of the hoverbike, tugging it along behind him.

The evon sighed, and then smiled apologetically to the grend commander. "I really am sorry about him. He doesn't usually consider others as having any inherent right to live. It's a rather common cultural trend where he comes from, I hear."

"Dun worry 'bout it," the grend grunted as the gate finally finished opening. "I did'n like tha' one anyway. Come on, then. I'll lead ya to a nice inn. An' then you can get ta your... 'diplomacy'."

* * *

K hopped along the ground for a bit, his head held up high in the air as he searched the area all about him.

It was difficult to do, given the height of the grass, but he felt he had a pretty good view of the area surrounding him. He could have taken to the air and gotten a much better view, but as he was still trying to avoid the attention of any scouts or wandering dragons, the metadragon opted to stay grounded.

Not seeing anything, K lowered his head.

"Marco!" He shouted.

"Polo!" Came a voice far to his right.

K immediately scurried to off toward the voice, the grass around him falling in a narrow wave as it was clipped by the blades on the edge of his wings.

After a few seconds he stopped, noticing that the grass in the area looked completely undisturbed except where he had passed earlier.

'Then again, Ranma's got light feet,' the metadragon thought to himself. 'A little grass would never give him away so easily

Lowering his body to the ground, he squinted his eyes carefully as he slowly looked over the surrounding area.

A slight flicker in the air to his left immediately grabbed his attention. It was very brief, short enough for most people to dismiss it as their imagination or a trick of the light, but it was all K had to go on. "GOTCHA!!"

Bolting into the air, the metadragon zipped forward into a headlong charge, and was rewarded when the negligible flicker became a strange, wavy blur before materializing into Ranma's image.

The pigtailed boy caught K roughly, barely managing to keep his balance from the impact. "Whoa! Whoa! Easy there, little guy! Fine, you got me. Calm down." He smirked as K hopped away and landed lightly on the ground. "What gave me away?"

"Not much," the metadragon mumbled. "I saw a little blur or something as you moved. If I hadn't seen you turn invisible in the first place, I wouldn't have thought anything of it."

Ranma nodded in satisfaction. "Okay, so the technique is almost perfect..." then he sighed. "Except that it's exhausting to keep up for long."

K raised an eyebrow. "What? Does it take up a lot of energy or something?" Frankly, he thought that Ranma should be completely satisfied with the incredible achievement of being able to turn completely invisible without the aid of magic, but the pigtailed wanderer never seemed to be satisfied with just accomplishing the impossible.

"Naw, not that," Ranma clarified, swinging one arm out sharply. A short sword immediately slid free of his sleeve and into his waiting hand. "It's just that every time I touch something, I can feel the vibrations trying to let light into..." he trailed off, unsure of how to explain the technique properly. "Well, basically, when I touch stuff my body wants to turn visible again, and it takes a lot of concentration not to. So even walking slowly is pretty tiring." Then he held up his right hand and snorted as he stared at the bejeweled gauntlet. "Then I've got THIS thing screwing up my ki... not an easy technique at all."

Without further comment, he tossed the weapon on the ground in front of K, who immediately pounced on the steel morsel.

_Chomp! Clang!_ "Mmph! So, how did you _Clink!_ develop this technique so quickly _Gulp!_ anyway?"

Ranma shrugged. "I didn't, really. It's a revision of that illusion clone thing I learned from the Shisou. And I've been practicing pretty much every night."

_Chomp!_ K finished swallowing the blade of the weapon, and then looked up. "Really? Nobody ever noticed that you were up and about."

"Well, yeah. That was kind of the point," Ranma deadpanned. "Not that it would have been any challenge to sneak around you and Kaze when you sleep; you guys wouldn't wake up for anything softer than open machine gun fire."

"What about Rayden?" K asked as he picked up the sword handle in his foreclaws and started nibbling on it.

"Yeah, well, he was my main test subject, but not a very good one," Ranma admitted, sitting down in the grass. "He might be awake twenty-four hours, but that doesn't make him any more aware than anyone else. Still, it was decent practice up until now."

_Gulp!_ K polished off the rest of the sword, and then looked up at Ranma. "Do you think you'll really be able to get into the fortress with that?"

"I've gotten into lots of fortifications without being invisible, but it's hard to say," Ranma said, shrugging. "But I'm pretty sure that I can at least get close without raising the alarm." Then the pigtailed man stretched his arms into the air as he yawned. "For now though, we need to get some rest right away."

K looked at Ranma strangely. "Now? It won't even be completely dark for another half hour! If the distance estimates you worked out are anywhere close to accurate, then we could make it to the capital outskirts before the night's over!"

Ranma snorted as he walked back to his shelter and the rock that was sitting over it. "Yeah, and then we can sleep within spitting distance of Greken's entire army. No thanks. I need to be well-rested when I reach the capital. Besides, lizardmen are really sluggish in the morning, especially when its cold. It'll be much easier to dodge any more patrols."

K immediately bowed his head to the barrage of experience coming from his human companion, and scurried forward toward the shelter. "All right, all right, good point. But I'm going to have a hard time sleeping this early!"

"Yeah, yeah," Ranma mumbled as he rolled his eyes. "It's always something with you, isn't it? You want some pennies?"

For some reason that none of Ranma's party - much less K himself - could figure out, copper seemed to make the metadragon drowsy in short order, like a weak tranquilizer. It was one of the many mysteries of K's irritating metabolism.

After flipping a few cents into K's mouth, Ranma slipped into the shelter he had dug, stripped off his leather armor, and then placed it on one of the slopes to act as a pillow.

Ranma then moved the rock further over the top of the hole he had dug, and then finally settled down at the bottom of his shelter to sleep.

"Good night," K said automatically.

"'Night, K," Ranma responded, immediately feeling himself drift off.

"Don't let the deathcrawlers bite," the metadragon added, though it seemed more deliberate this time.

"..." Ranma promptly felt his alertness return to him, and his eyebrow twitched.

"Because their poison is lethal within minutes of injection, and their fangs can pierce standard-issue Kevlar, leaving you no defense if you happen to be unconscious when-" _Whap!_ "Ow!"

"Shut up, K," Ranma demanded as night fell.

* * *

"Well, I was really hoping for something more 'Los Angelos Hilton' and less 'ye olde Green Dragon,' but I suppose you've done the best you could," Kaze said as he leaned back in his chair, a large smoked turkey drumstick in one hand.

The barmaid giving him a shoulder massage squeaked in surprise as the chair tilted too far back to remain balanced, and immediately a nearby lizardman jumped forward and held it up.

Kaze took a bite of his drumstick, pretending that he didn't notice. _Chomp! Chomp! Gulp!_ "Really though, while it's nice of you to put all this security in place, it's quite unnecessary. Me and Shikodan get along quite nicely, and I can assure you there is nobody poised to disrupt these negotiations." As he spoke he pointed to his mug of ale, which promptly floated up off the table and into his waiting hand so that he could take a sip.

To say that Rayden and Kaze had caused a stir was less accurate than to say that the local guard's reaction to them had caused a stir. The humans in the tavern were mostly huddled into tables and booths along the walls to get as far away from the guards who had loosely encircled the two "diplomats" in the center, and even when it was explained to them who the large, rough-looking man and elegant, wealthy-looking evon were, very few of them understood the significance of it.

The lizardmen, on the other hand, were on the edge of their seats, so to speak. Every guard that had no duties or could possibly get out of them had crammed into the tavern to witness the historic event that had been passed along the rumor mill.

To Kaze this was troubling; he did not consider the gravity of his presence to be especially great, but that was probably because he had been coronated avatar in his home city (where people knew him very well, and usually didn't think very well of him) and had then traveled with companions who didn't care at all about his status or potential power.

Out in semi-civilization, however, the title of Avatar was of such prestige that his plan for getting into the village had worked perfectly... and had ensured that the rest of Greken's territories would know all about their presence by the end of the day.

'Oh well,' Kaze thought to himself as he took another bite of turkey. 'At least Rayden adapted easily enough to pretending to be the avatar of his cult. I was afraid that perhaps it was considered a blasphemy, as in mine.'

The grend commander, who seemed far less enthusiastic than all of his men about Kaze and Rayden's presence, cleared his throat. "It'll do, I'm sure. Also, m'name is-"

"Yes, yes, I'm sure you told me at some earlier date, and I just forgot," Kaze said, waving the demonic reptile off, and leaving unsaid that he didn't care for the grend to repeat himself. "So, about all the guards?"

The grend snorted. "Nah all of 'em are on duty. An' besides, it's necessary."

"For what?" Kaze asked, raising an eyebrow.

"What the hell is this?!"

Kaze and the grend both winced as Rayden shouted from the adjacent table before slamming his mug down.

The barmaid that had served the drink went pale, holding her serving tray up against her chest nervously as she backed away. "Is s-something wrong, S-Sir?"

"You call this beer? I've slogged through swamp muck better than this!" The Dread Knight snarled, swatting the drink off his table and onto the floor.

Then, before Kaze could do much more than gasp, Rayden snatched a pistol from within his coat and fired.

_BLAM!_ "Gyaugh!" The lizardman lurched backward as its sternum collapsed from the heavy bullet, slamming its head into a wooden post before the round exited its back, along with many of its favorite organs.

The barmaid blinked, staring at the large pistol in Rayden's hand. "Uh... why did you shoot him?"

"Because I was pissed off!" Rayden explained, sitting back down with his gun down on the table. "Also, it was a female, not a male."

The young woman didn't bother to dwell on how he had been able to discern the reptile's gender so quickly, and planted her hands on her hips. "Yeah, but weren't you mad at me? Or at the bar owner, maybe?"

"Martial code, lady," Rayden muttered, fishing some crackers out of the bowl in the middle of the table. "I don't kill unarmed civilians. It's just lame."

"So you'll randomly kill anyone with a weapon instead? That's stupid," the barmaid insisted.

Rayden glared at her for a moment, and then pointed his pistol to his right, at a lizardman near the entrance.

_BLAM!_ "Sreeah!" _Thud!_

"So that's it? Seriously? You're just going to shoot a guard every time you get mad?"

_BLAM!_ "Hurgh!" _Thump!_

"What, now you're just shooting one every time I open my mouth?"

_BLAM!_ "Whyyyyyy..." _Whunk!_

Kaze sighed. "Yes, I begin to see your point." Frankly, he was amazed that the remaining lizardmen hadn't scattered and fled yet, though some of them were upending tables to use as barricades. For that matter the humans didn't look terribly concerned either, but then, Kaze guessed that few of them appreciated the guards' presence in the first place.

"But anyway, shouldn'ya be gettin' on wit' your little meetin' by now?" The grend commander asked gruffly. "If ya delay much longer, I'm gonna run outta men."

_BLAM!_

"Right, right. It is as you say," Kaze mumbled, standing up from his chair.

"Budapest is the capital of Hungary," the barmaid said, her arms crossed over her chest.

_BLAM!_ A lizardman taking cover behind a table was sent rolling backwards from the shot, blood spraying all over the floor as he learned precisely how little an inch of wood did to stop a 20mm bolter slug.

"Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers," the young woman continued.

_Click!_ Rayden blinked as he realized that he had run out of ammo, and then reached into his coat for his other gun.

"_Ahem!_ Shikodan, I know you're having fun, but isn't there some official business to attend to?" Kaze said, placing his hand on the larger man's shoulder.

Rayden raised an eyebrow, though much to the reptillians' relief, he put his gun away. "Official business? Like what?"

Kaze's eye twitched. "Like, say, the whole REASON we came here tonight?"

Rayden stared at him blankly.

"The TREATY?"

Rayden snapped his fingers. "OH! Right. That. Sure. What about it?"

"We sort of need to work that out. Now is as good a time as any." Kaze sat down across from Rayden, and both of them noticed that suddenly most of the tavern quieted down substantially. "So! What exactly are the areas in dispute, Lord Shikodan?"

Rayden raised an eyebrow. "What areas? How should I know? This was your idea."

A vein popped up on Kaze's head, and he briefly reached out with his telepathic powers to the man across from him. '_Shikodan, would you play along already? I barely know the geography around Taer'Kul, much less Mongolia!_'

"What, and you think I know anything about this area?" Rayden snapped back. "Ranma was the one leading us around out there, not me!"

'_You've been traveling for years, you should at least be able to make something up that sounds believable! I don't know what the humans around here name their countries! And would you PLEASE respond mentally instead of speaking out loud?_'

The Dread Knight blinked. "How do I do that?"

Kaze twitched as he quickly glanced about the room, noting the confused expressions among the guards that weren't still hiding from Rayden's arbitrary wrath. "Never mind," he mumbled.

'Okay, Shikodan is going to be absolutely no help here,' Kaze thought to himself, rubbing his chin. 'Hmmm... remember what Master Saotome said. Plans often fail, so flexibility is key. I'll have to use the tools I have available.'

Nodding decisively, Kaze took a deep breath before his expression turned deeply serious. "The first order of business is to discuss your faction's cruel and indefensible occupation of Park Place and Boardwalk!"

_Crash!_ Every human in the room immediately facefaulted.

Rayden blinked. "Eh? Whaddya mean?"

"Your stationing of houses... uh, **troops** in these two vital regions have created an oppressive stranglehold on traffic to the Baltic and Mediterranean Avenue regions! Why, there are some who would rather sit themselves in jail than risk your blockade!" Kaze said, waving one hand in the air dramatically.

Rayden raised an eyebrow, and then shrugged. "Feh. We paid for the troops, so we deserve our fees. It 'aint our problem if some people just can't handle the toll."

"On the contrary," Kaze countered, straightening. "Your elimination of viable play... **traders** from the area causes considerable damage to a continental economy already plagued by the considerable dangers of the wastes, to say nothing of random stock market crashes and exorbitant tax penalties. That harms everybody, not just the bankrupted individuals in question."

"Hey, part of stationing those troops there is to keep those routes safer in the first place," Rayden retorted. "Besides!" _WHAM!_ He suddenly slammed his fist onto the table, causing a deep crack to appear in the wooden surface and causing all of the nearby guards to flinch. "Between your holding both our water and energy supplies, plus that damn dog that owns all the railroads, we have to scrape by with every advantage we've got! You won't see us running off just so you can drive us into ruin! Put something on the table, and then we'll see about making a deal!"

One of the lizardmen near the bar hissed excitedly, turning to one of the other guards. "Sssurely, we are witnesssing history unfolding before our very eyesss! The Third and the Order forging a treaty could change the entire balance of power within the wastesss!"

"Indeed! I shudder to think of what a viciousss place this 'Boardwalk' mussst be!"

A man sitting at the bar next to them gave the pair of reptillians an odd look, and then leaned in toward the bartender. "They're not serious, are they? This entire 'negotiation' is a crock!" He whispered, although the guards were far too engrossed by the 'diplomacy' to pay any attention to some civilian's mutterings.

The bartender shrugged. "Hey, whatever keeps the big one from shooting up lizards inside. Cleanup is hard enough when it's just spilled beer and vomit, you know?"

"I hear that. Another shot of whiskey, please?"

"Better take two. I think they're gonna be at this for a while."

* * *

Thousands of miles away, a golden-haired man pulled himself up the last few rungs of the ladder leading to the surface, and away from the vacant, blood-stained tunnels below.

Kais frowned as he climbed over the great metal lip of the vault that the humans had built to protect his resting place (though they obviously knew nothing of it at the time).

The entire area around the vault entrance, save a few tents, had been absolutely demolished. Craters decorated the ground, and charred skeletons were everywhere, some of them piled high within bonfires that glowed with unnatural light, and burned without any apparent source of fuel.

"Hmmm..." Kais stared at the skeletons, and his eyes narrowed. "I sense the remnants of dark powers here. Necromancy."

He shook his head. This was all wrong! Necromancy was a terrible, baneful practice that should not have developed on this world. Did this realm's inhabitants somehow develop it on their own? Or was it introduced?

'Then again, demons aren't supposed to walk these lands either, and yet I've seen proof that they do,' Kais thought, looking up into the sky.

"I... I believe I may have failed after all. This... This..." a sudden, powerful shiver crawled through his body. "This region is MUCH colder than I remember it."

Indeed, Kais was still nude. Not only that, but despite being literally ripped apart, burnt, pierced, and partially dissolved in his tussle with Doppler hours earlier, the golden-haired man bore not a single scratch or scar to remind him of the conflict.

Pressing his lips into a thin line, he held out his left hand, which possessed the only article of clothing he possessed other than his headband.

The gem set in the wrist began to glow, and the snow underneath Kais' feet began to glow as well, the hard-packed, dirty ice turning into motes of glimmering yellow light that floated upward into the palm of the gauntlet.

The light gradually collected into a unique shape hanging down from Kais' hand, and then suddenly dimmed and vanished, revealing a long-sleeved shirt of unknown material that was colored a bleak gray.

Kais quickly put on the garment, and then more snow and dirt rose from the ground as bits of glowing light to form a pair of pants.

"Yes, that's much better," Kais said to himself as he slipped the pants on, feeling the cold wind battering against the insulation of his new, relatively thin clothing. He didn't bother making shoes though, immediately scanning the surrounding area carefully.

"I must learn more about the situation before I can find a way to correct it," the strange man decided, choosing a direction seemingly at random. "But first..." He glanced irritably at the gauntlet on his left hand. "First I must collect the other pieces."

Without another word, he headed out in his chosen direction, leaving behind the burning remains of his prison.

* * *

End Chapter 15 


	16. Battle of Dragonkeep

Species: Squarmatis sapien

Common name: Lizardman

Class: Monster

Subspecies: Several distinct breeds of lizardman have been seen on occasion outside of the families and settlements in which they tend to make their homes, usually in the more cosmopolitan cities in Asia. Although most often the differences amount to brilliant and unique color patterns, others have special adaptations to certain environments such as webbed feet, enlarged teeth, and even venom sacs.

Sentience & Intelligence: Possess a basic sentient intellect capable of language and reasoning. Lizardmen have great difficulty grasping abstract concepts, and highly value utility over appearance. According to a common proverb among the evons, if you offer a lizardman a choice between a steel axe and a golden one, the creature will choose the steel weapon every time, and will never realize that it could easily purchase many steel weapons for the value of the gold axe. Although field studies have not as of yet confirmed this particular experiment, corraborated accounts suggest that the underlying implications are accurate.

Physical biology: Lizardmen tend toward a full standing height of seven feet, although their body shape causes the creature to stoop over at a height much closer to five or six feet. They possess long, whip-like tails that seem to lack any practical use save perhaps for balance, and have large heads with thick, solid skulls and powerful jaws. Their upper torso is considerably human-like, and their limbs are relatively powerful. Their skin is covered with layers of scales that provides substantial resistance to cutting weapons such as swords, though it provides little resistance against bullets. They possess a good sense of smell and taste, but have relatively dull eyesight and hearing. As for their internal biology, they are similar to humans in almost every respect, though their organs are generally more robust and energy-efficient. The primary exception is their circulatory system; lizardmen are cold-blooded.

Mana resonance: Low. The very few lizardman casters that exist take their magic from second-hand powers, such as alchemic reactions or religious devotion.

Lifespan: On average, a lizardman can expect to live about 90 years if allowed to expire from natural causes. Cases have been reported, however, of lizardmen living for centuries, usually through heavy medicinal aid.

Diet: Omnivorous. A lizardman's powerful digestive system can make use of nearly any organic matter to sustain the body. Lizardmen are capable of eating nearly anything for sustenance, including poisonous vegetables and diseased meats. While a lizardman is (understandably) extremely hesitant to eat these things, as their sense of taste is considerably more sensitive than a human's, their bodies can make full use of inedible foods to keep their strength up when decent food is scarce.

Biological anomalies: Although it doesn't approach the level of troll or lycanthropic regeneration, lizardmen are able to heal wounds much faster than their enhanced metabolisms can account for. Also remarkable is the lizardman's ability to heal any part of its body, including lost limbs, eyes, and major organs, although obviously, the subject has to survive the trauma long enough to complete regeneration.

Reproductive type: Sexual. Lizardmen do not form permanent mating pairs, nor does the species as a whole invest much time and effort into the mating process. Rather, after reaching adolescence, a lizardman will enter a "mating state" every three to four years which will cause it to release pheremones that will react with lizardmen of the opposite sex who are undergoing the same effect. The female's choice of mates seems almost arbitrary among a mating group, and will forget all about the male after fertilization.

Social structure: Lizardmen usually form small tribes within other civilizations, as the species as a whole is rarely content to live in isolation. These tribes, though insulated from other species, isn't based upon any recognizable family structure, and will freely accept and give up lizardmen without a thought. These tribes, when not the dominant form of civilization in an area, will happily spread about seeking a sponsor among more advanced societies, and the tribe will rent out its members as soldiers, guards, manual laborers, scouts, or whatever tasks they can effectively complete. Decisions within the community are made with a firm and unquestioned emphasis on rank, which is in turn determined by both age and any notable accomplishments. Families based on blood are extremely rare; normally, eggs are deposited into a communal nursery, and young lizardmen are raised by communal guardians. Most lizardmen are unaware of who among the tribe are their parents, and don't seem to care, although at times their "sponsors" may see a particularly promising lizardman and start a breeding program. The tribe is extremely receptive to such experiments, as the prospect of superior future lizardmen inevitably outweighs the concerns of the individual being "sacrificed" as breeding stock.

Combat analysis: Low. Although well-suited as soldiers among the legions of sword-wielding demons and the primitive human armies of other realms, when fighting Earth's soldiers the poor reptiles almost always come up short. Possessing poor vision, dexterity, and intelligence, lizardmen have never managed to master either the use of or defense against common firearms, which swiftly degraded their viability as a combat asset against Earth's humans. At best they make excellent guards, as the creatures are unusually loyal to the tribe's sponsor, and they can easily overwhelm small, unorganized combatants.

Misc. notes: If one limits the scale of conflict to melee and primitive missile combat - that is, swords, spears, bows, and crossbows - it's easy to see why lizardmen made favored soldiers. The creatures are built from the bottom up to withstand hardship and survive in nearly any environment capable of sustaining life at all. A lizardman's scales provide natural armor, its primitive nervous system is dull in regards to pain, and its robust body is extremely hardy. It can eat nearly anything, and when even rotten and poisonous food isn't available, the lizardman can function for weeks before starvation begins to take a real toll on its body. It's capable of surviving for almost as long without water, is resistant to disease, and can stay active and healthy in heat that would destroy the human body in hours. From deserts and wastelands to swamps, a battalion of lizardmen can survive in places that would devastate an ordinary army worse than most battles. Unfortunately, in our lovely realm of Earth, the deadliest hazards are all man-made, and lizardmen show no talent for handling guns, ambushing armored vehicles, or navigating mine fields. Although still common among the wastes as mercenaries and laborers, most non-humans have stopped actively using them for combat, instead turning toward more exotic creatures, or turning toward more mundane ones capable of using firearms. One more interesting note is the lizardman's unfortunate weakness for cold. While active and robust in agonizing heat, chilling cold that would hardly slow down a human regiment nearly debilitates the cold-blooded lizards. This makes arctic tundra one of the few terrain types in which a lizardman is totally ineffective. On a different note, this also means that the lizards are far slower and less aware at night and during winter months than they are when the sun is shining.

US Research Division Omega - Survey File M2221

Nexus II  
by Black Dragon (black_)  
.com/anime5/faniclair

What is UP with Drow, anyway? How can a basically malevolent, hateful, back-stabbing bunch of anorexic, stuck-up neurotics build a civilization in the first place? Makes no sense.

Chapter 16  
Battle of Dragonkeep  
**********************************************************************************

"Ungh..." Kaze groaned as he pushed himself up from the bed, scratching his head wearily.

'Ah, another morning of battle and adventure. Up and at 'em, then...' Kaze's stay at Taer'Kul was notable mostly for his acts of vice and debauchery, of which sloth had been one of his favorites. And although he wasn't prone to complaints about conditions that couldn't be helped, having to sleep outside on a blanket was probably his least favorite aspect of the adventurer's lifestyle.

That said, he had taken the opportunity to indulge himself, seeing how he was stuck in a village with no immediate objectives. Kaze had slept at least four hours past the time in which Ranma would have woken him up on the road.

In all fairness though, he had also gone to sleep a few hours later than he would have normally.

"Hmmm? Oh no, what time is it?" Mumbled a young brunette, turning over under the covers and yawning.

"Ah... ten or eleven, I think?" Kaze said, rooting around the pile of scattered clothing for his underwear and pants.

"Dang. I have to get to work," the woman said, sitting up slowly. Then she smirked at the evon cleric, running a hand through her hair. "But hey, if you're going to be in town for another night, let me know."

She swung her legs out over the side of the bed, and then halted, frowning. "Hey... do you smell that?"

"Eh?" Kaze stood up from where he had retrieved his shirt. "What?"

The girl sniffed the air for a moment, her forehead wrinkling. "It smells like... something's burning? No... more like something's cooking."

"Well, this is an inn, right? I have to assume you have a kitchen working at this time of day."

The young woman shook her head, holding the bed sheets up against her body as she stepped toward the window. "No, it smells like it's coming from... huh?"

After pulling his shirt down over his head, Kaze noticed his temporary paramour staring slack-jawed out the window, and he walked up behind her curiously. "What? Is something happening outside?"

His face darkened the moment he got a look out the window. "Oh. I... see."

The priest immediately turned back around and dressed himself in a flurry of activity, speaking quickly at the same time.

"Although I greatly enjoyed our time together, I'm afraid circumstances have arisen that require my immediate departure from this area. I apologize if my actions cause any offense, but please understand that my survival, and that of my associates, may be at stake!"

The girl rolled her eyes. "Yeah, yeah, I hear you. I think you'd better hurry, though."

Kaze nodded as he tugged on his gloves, and then removed the Eye of Malakai from the nightstand next to the bed. "Goodbye, then." _Vwom!_ The priest then vanished in a blur of light.

The young woman started picking her own clothes up off the floor, still sniffing the air on occasion. "Mmmm... that's not too bad, actually. Maybe I'll stop by on my break." She picked up her well-worn maid outfit and smoothed it out, laying it on top of the bed. "I've never had lizardman before. I wonder what it tastes like."

* * *

"Shikodan. I do believe that while your actions here do not constitute wrongdoing or a violation of Master Saotome's directives in the **strictest** sense, there are certain ramifications to what you've done that bear consideration," Kaze said gently in his best "diplomat" tone of voice.

Rayden grinned and then held out what appeared to be a folded-up patch of scaly, reptilian skin. "I made you a wallet!"

A sweatdrop rolled down Kaze's head as he hesitantly took the proffered item. "Th... Thank you..."

Next the Dread Knight held out a pair of boots, also covered in thick, sturdy scales. "How do ya like these shoes? Is the color good? I know the patterns don't match exactly, but it was hard to find a single skin that was in good enough shape and hadn't already been torn the wrong way."

"I don't think I've properly expressed my concerns," Kaze mumbled, rubbing his head. "Let me try again."

Rayden frowned. "Look, do you want the boots or not? These weren't easy to make, you know."

Situated behind the demonic paladin was what Kaze could honestly call the most festive and productive mass slaughter he had ever heard of. A great pile of some thirty or so lizardmen corpses, including perhaps a half-dozen grends, lay in the middle of the town square, the bodies in various states of mutilation and dismemberment. In front of the corpse pile lay several cook fires, each one with a skinned lizardman impaled on a spit and slowly roasting above the flames. Behind the mound of bodies was a pile of weaponry, no longer needed by the dead owners, and a stack of pelts expertly removed from the dead monsters that had previously guarded the town.

All about the square, the village's human settlers milled about, several of them quite pleased, while others looked at the scene in emotional states varying from disgust to horror.

"I can appreciate that our tastes in recreation diverge considerably," Kaze began again. "I like to sleep in, and enjoy fruitless procreation. You, on the other hand, seem to be abnormally predisposed against both of these, and that's fine. Murder as a hobby is... unorthodox, but I'm willing to keep an open mind."

Rayden snorted as he compared the scalehide boots to his own. "Well, they're too small for me. Doesn't that just figure? Hey, do you think Ranma needs some new shoes?"

"And putting aside the direct moral ramifications of killing sentient creatures out of boredom, I have to say I heartily approve of the effort you go through to find practical uses for the bodies of your victims. Very impressive, I must admit," Kaze continued.

"I wonder how a scalehide cloak would look," Rayden wondered aloud, rubbing his chin. "I'd need a special oil to keep it from drying out too firmly, though."

A vein popped up on Kaze's head as Rayden continued to talk to himself. "I have concerns, however, that in performing this act of liberation-slash-warfare-slash-serial murder, you may have prompted certain events that are outside of our ability to regulate."

Rayden raised an eyebrow. "Like what?"

"THE REVOLUTION HAS BEGUN!" A man screamed from behind Kaze, holding a pair of battered scimitars up into the air. "BROTHERS!! SISTERS!! THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING! SOON WE WILL WATER THIS ENTIRE VALLEY WITH THE COOL, DARK BLOOD OF THE REPTILIAN OPPRESSORS!!"

Another sweatdrop ran down Kaze's head. "Well... like that."

Rayden shrugged. "What? I like his attitude."

"I can't argue with the validity or righteousness of his cause," Kaze explained patiently, "but these people have no chance to fight off even a small segment of Greken's army. A rebellion via direct, armed conflict is impossible, but standing next to a pile of eviscerated lizardmen, that may not be apparent. What's going to happen to these people?"

Rayden shrugged again. "I assume they'll charge into battle in a furious mob, and then die in a blast of fire or something. Not a bad way to go."

"While that may be a perfectly splendid scenario according to your beliefs, against mine it poses a considerable problem," the cleric deadpanned.

"Like what?" The demon knight asked yet again.

"Noble warriors!" The man from before suddenly said, clapping Kaze on the shoulder. "At last, the outside world has seen our suffering and granted us salvation! With you by our side, victory is assured!"

Kaze paled considerably, though he managed a weak smile. "Ah... yes... I was afraid of this..."

Rayden frowned and crossed his arms over his chest. "Now wait a minute, I never agreed to nothing. I have other things to do, ya know."

The man looked shocked, as if Rayden's participation had been guaranteed. "But... But without your aid, I'm certain we'll be crushed!"

"So what?" The demon knight responded. "At least you died trying, right?"

"Please, reconsider!" The self-appointed rebel leader said, his voice rising to its earlier "motivational" pitch. "If not for us, then for our families, and the future generations that must grow up in fear of rampaging dragons and bow to a master that brutally oppresses us!"

"Meh." The Dread Knight shrugged off the man's concerns as he picked up another lizardman skin, judging the pelt critically.

"Okay..." the revolutionary pursed his lips for a moment. "Then if not for us OR our families, would you do it for the chance to kill another few regiments of reptiles?"

Kaze, who had been quietly inching away ever since the man had started talking to Rayden, was suddenly yanked back to the fore as the dark paladin grabbed him by the arm.

"We have to help these people!" Rayden said dramatically, shaking a fist in the air angrily. "Their plea for the bloody demise of their foes has moved me."

Kaze shed a silent tear, then sighed. "You realize that your assistance will almost certainly bring you into direct conflict with Greken's draconic forces, right? And thus in violation of Master Saotome's request?"

Rayden blinked. "No I don't," he said honestly. Then he blinked again. "Oops. Okay, yeah, **now** I realize it."

The evon priest frowned, and then straightened as Rayden let go of him. "All right, fine. Since it seems apparent that conflict is unavoidable, I have no choice but to lend my full assistance to avoid complete disaster."

"Yes! With the aid of... the avatars or whatever you two are, we cannot fail!" The rebel cheered, with several others among the square starting to arm themselves and shout excitedly. "Today marks the-"

"First order of business," Kaze said sharply, "could you silence him?"

_Whock!_ Rayden brought his fist down on top of the rebel's skull, causing the man to sputter incoherently for a few seconds before he collapsed onto the ground. "Done."

"Good. Now go ahead and... well, finish whatever you're doing here. Give meat and weapons to anyone who wants some. I have to go speak to some people who do business in the other towns."

"So, did you want a scalehide cloak? I'm making scalehide cloaks, I think," Rayden said enthusiastically, hanging a grend's skin up in the air.

Kaze sweatdropped as he scurried off. "Make whatever you want! I'll be busy for some time!"

Rayden dropped his arms, somewhat disappointed. Then he looked left, and then right.

Then the demon knight rummaged through the unconscious rebel's pockets, located his money, and then walked off with it, whistling happily to himself.

* * *

Dashtall Greken's main keep was truly a mighty fortress by any standards, modern or antique.

Built into the side of an active volcano that was situated at the end of the deep valley known as Olahan's Maw, the castle's main wall was composed of massive lengths of slate that formed the castle periphery, which was shielded by a ragged but effective patchwork of enormous metal plates bolted onto the rock foundation and reinforced from the inside. The corners of the wall were punctuated with solidly-built armored towers, and the gate was so thick and well-layered with blast armor that it could have withstood nearly any modern armament.

Artillery cannons, probably scavenged from battlefields in the wastes, stood atop the ramparts in varying states of disrepair as short grend troopers patrolled the tops of the walls, machine guns slung underneath their arms.

All around the castle lay a moat of molten lava, populated by great salamanders that regularly surged to the surface to unleash great puffs of smoke and inhale fresh air before sinking below the molten surface once again.

The top of the castle was reinforced no less than the outer wall, in part to protect against the bombing raids that were a favored tactic of the human armies, but also to create a stable nest for a great shadow dragon that slumbered in a ring of cattle bones and armor scraps.

Where Dashtall's fortress would have proven inadequate against the modern weapons of larger armies, the fortification made up the slack with its numerous draconic guardians. Scattered over the volcano were numerous wyvern nests, and fire dragons basked lazily atop magma vents that regularly belched smoke and flame into the air. Surrounding the fortress were numerous pits and quarries that served as venom dragon and earth dragon nests, while other serpent kings nested in caverns carved out of the valley walls.

With the overwhelming force Greken commanded, and the fortifications that kept the demon lord safe from all but the heaviest bombardments, his fortress was a formidable bastion by any measure, and would have stood up to any conventional army, whether demonic, technological, or magical. Against such might, certainly even the greatest band of adventurers stood no chance in direct combat.

Ranma's band of religious misfits were far from the greatest. And when one removed the demonic muscle and smart magic and left him with only the annoyingly talkative and perpetually hungry mini-dragon, things looked much bleaker.

"I really don't understand the logic of this approach, I have to admit," K said nervously as he clutched Ranma's shoulder, keeping his head low. "Do you remember last night? When we stayed far away from the fortress because it was safer? I'm kind of liking that approach now. I think we need to take a step back in that direction."

The pair was currently located far above and behind the fortress, high atop the volcano that towered above the castle and protected it from behind. Ranma was currently crouched behind one of the many rock outcroppings that surrounded the lip of the chasm, and was carefully observing one of the caves that led deeper into the volcano.

"No, I think we found what we're looking for," Ranma said, ducking back down. "It's not gonna be easy, of course. Never is."

"You're crazy, aren't you? Damn it, I knew you were crazy, but now you're... **double crazy**," K mumbled.

Ranma rolled his eyes. "Look, it's like this: the front of the fortress is too well-protected to go straight at it. Even if my invisibility stunt works perfectly, it's going to be nearly impossible to keep it up until I get past every patrol, guard, and trained animal keeping watch. Not to mention that it might have all sorts of enchantments or magic that could trip me up."

He jabbed a thumb at the mouth of the cave. "I'm ninety percent sure that there's a way to get into the fortress through this volcano here. More importantly, they don't fortify this entrance 'cause it'll get in the way of the dragons, who they figure can protect the back entrance without any guards around. Who'd be stupid enough to try and get into a castle through a volcano infested with dragons?"

K twitched. "You, apparently."

"Exactly!" Ranma turned back toward his objective, either not realizing or not caring about the cheap insult. "Getting into the castle through the front gate is impossible. Trying to get into the castle from the mountain is still suicidal. This... is only stupid. As infiltration routes go, it's as good as I'm going to get. Unless I had a ridiculously convenient diversion, maybe."

"Like what?"

Ranma shrugged. "I dunno... like a sudden peasant uprising, or something. But forget that. I have to work with what I've got in front of me."

He turned about again, and slid several knives out of his sleeves. "Out at the entrance we've just got some lizardmen dragging food to the dragons every couple minutes. I can get around that, easy. Inside is going to be trickier, depending on how many fire drakes they have loafing around and how well-guarded the back door is."

K gulped. "What am I going to do, though?"

Ranma raised an eyebrow. "You? You're a dragon. There are dozens of other dragons all over the place. Just... I dunno, blend in. Try to pretend like you belong here."

A vein popped up on K's head. "Are you serious? That's your plan for me? Do you have any idea how uncommon metadragons are?"

"Not really, no. It's hard to appreciate how rare you are when I spend most of my time wishing you'd leave me alone," Ranma deadpanned.

"I'm serious!" The metadragon shouted. "We're not dealing with your average, IQ 20 demonkin, here! If I get caught, I could be in serious trouble!"

Ranma snorted. "Yeah, real trouble. Unless you've forgotten, they want YOU alive. You'll survive. Just make up a story or something. You seem pretty good at that."

K fretted incoherently for several seconds, and Ranma nodded after peeking out at the volcano entrance again. "Okay, go ahead! Just fly out there, and zip into the cave entrance like you own the place!"

The metadragon shuddered. "I... I can't! I can't just-"

"C'mon K, I'm asking you to be useful for once!" Ranma asked, poking his pet/companion in the back. "If you're so sure that you'll attract attention, you can at least attract attention while I'm trying to sneak in!"

"B-But... any one of those guys could kill me in an instant! Fire dragons aren't known for being neighborly! I'm encroaching on their territory!"

"You and twenty other oversized lizards," Ranma said, crossing his arms over his chest. "Look, one way or another, I have to get in there. That means that either I follow you in, or I leave you here."

K winced badly. "Okay... Okay, hold on..." He took a deep breath, and then hopped up onto the rocks, taking his first good look at the volcano. "Just relax. You belong here. You're just another dragon. Probably just another absurdly loyal, maybe-brainwashed serpent king flitting about the place, 'cause, hey, you're a dragon! What are people going to do about it? I can go where-YIPE!"

About this time, Ranma got sick of listening to K's self-motivational speech, and so he grabbed the young dragon around the waist and hurled him mightily toward the cave entrance.

"GAH! HEY! I wasn't ready! You jerk!" K shouted, flapping his wings rapidly to try and recover his stability in the air.

After a few seconds he regained normal flight, thankfully before he hit the wall of the volcano (unsurprisingly, Ranma had an excellent throwing arm), and growled in irritation as he hovered in place above the ground.

It didn't take long for K to realize that he had been shouting angrily out loud, and that it had gained him the attention of everything resting outside the volcano entrance: in total five lizardmen, two lesser salamanders, and several of the enormous, iguana-like saurus that had been loafing about in the heat from the nearby magma flows.

"Uh... Eh heh heh..." K chuckled nervously as he slowly turned away from the various reptilians, sweat pouring down his head. 'Okay, this TOTALLY makes us even after the IEF thing. I could die!'

Trying his best to pretend that he wasn't totally panicking, K slowly floated over to the cave entrance, trying not to make eye contact with any of the lizardmen or pseudo-dragons.

To his relief, the other reptilians promptly turned away, apparently dismissing the undeniably suspicious dragon as nothing more than an unusually loud resident.

K made his way into the smoking cavern of the volcano, floating forward at a crawl as he took it all in.

Bones of cattle, boars, horses, and the occasional human littered the interior of the cavern entrance, the skeletal remains steeped in piles of hot, glowing ash.

K found the image unsettling, but not alarming or unexpected. What was more repulsive was the pair of young fire dragons - both of them already the size of horses, K noted enviously - deeper in, fighting over the shredded and scorched remains of some species of large humanoid.

The metadragon fought his initial instinct to fly straight around and leave, and instead flew in a steady, noiseless beeline straight toward a magma pit in the center of the cavern. The moment he was above the pool of molten rock, K was hit by a wave of intense heat, and the metadragon wobbled about in the air for a few seconds as he adjusted for the sudden updraft.

Glancing down into the pit, K saw five large eggs sitting comfortably within the bubbling magma, each one thick with veins of heavy metal ore wrapping around the outside of the shell.

The metadragon hesitated, idly wondering what the egg shells tasted like. He almost always preferred properly smelted metal to raw ore, but the veins in the shells looked abnormally pure, and it made him curious. Not that he would destroy a fertile egg to get a snack, but he could see bits of shell stuck to the walls of the magma nest, tempting him.

_Splash!_ K's eyes bugged out as a voluptuous, tanned, red-haired, naked, and apparently fire-proof young woman suddenly emerged from the surface of the magma pit, standing up and stretching as if she was just waking up from a nap.

It did not escape K's notice that the molten-hot liquids ran down her body like water without leaving the barest mark upon her glistening, well-tanned skin, nor were the implications of such complete heat resistance beyond his understanding. At the moment though, his faculties had more important things to contemplate.

'Boobiesboobiesboobiesboobiesboobies**big**boobiesboobiesboobies!'

Once the fire dragon in female form glanced up at him, however, K remembered that his current predicament was far too delicate for him to lose his concentration to teenage hormones, and he quickly darted forward, trying to pretend that he hadn't seen anything.

'Okay, easy now. Look for a way down. There should be a side tunnel, or a deep cavern, or maybe even a lift to-'

"Hey there. Hold," a gruff, yet somehow feminine voice said from behind K, and the metadragon flinched before slowly turning in the air.

It was the female from before, now dressed in a plain red cloak to match her hair. She was standing about a meter behind K, and was staring at the younger dragon suspiciously. "I've never seen you around here before. Who are you?"

"H-Hi! I-I'm K!" The metadragon stuttered out hysterically. "Uh... so... what's your sign?"

The redhead ignored the outdated pick-up line and stalked closer to him. "What are you doing, skulking around in the fire dragon nests? You don't belong here."

"You don't say!" K shouted, flying backwards slowly as he glanced about for an escape route. "Well, then I'd better be on my way to where I do belong, then!"

K zipped around and tried to fly deeper into the cave when the fire dragon grabbed him by the tail, and after a brief yelp, the metadragon hung limply from her hand.

"Hmm... are you a silver dragon or a rock dragon? I've never seen one like you before," she started turning him about in her hand, staring intensely at her victim.

"M-Metadragon, actually. I'm... uh... new here," he said lamely, hoping that his species sounded inedible.

Surprisingly, the redhead seemed entirely mollified by the response. "Ah, I gotcha. Just shipped in and still poking around, huh? That's fine, but you should be careful about wandering into other dragon's nests. Some of the old ones are real finicky about their territory, and can be really aggressive around their eggs."

"Hey now, wassis sis?"

"Is it food? Is it? Is it? I'm still hungry!"

K froze up as he watched the pair of young fire drakes from before saunter up behind his current captor, flame emerging in small puffs from their long jaws.

The redhead promptly backhanded the second one, knocking its head back and causing it to run about in a circle wildly as it yelped and hissed.

"By Greken, did a boulder fall on your skull when you were hatched?" She growled, glaring at the pitiful dragon. "Not everything that wanders through the cave is food, all right?"

She smiled as she turned back to K. "I'm sorry about these two brats. My name is Sarhee. These are my younger brothers, Kal and Lehjid. Lehjid is the stupid one."

"Nice to... meet you?" K asked awkwardly, still being held upside-down by his tail.

Kal smirked. "What's this thing? Barely a hatchling! He shouldn't even be out from behind his mama's tail!"

Sarhee let out a sharp hiss. "I would gladly say the same about you, dolt. For his apparent age, he speaks better than you do."

She turned back to K, her expression becoming instantly much gentler. "Come on, now. I'll take you to the overseer, and we can see about getting you back to your own nest."

"Urk!" K immediately stiffened again. "O-Overseer? You have overseers?"

"Of course we do," explained Sarhee as she walked toward the back of the cave, the two younger males following wordlessly. "Lord Greken cannot handle us all personally, and has many affairs to take care of. It only makes sense that he'd delegate to his vassals."

'That's insane. No dragon would ever consent to being third on a command chain. Well, other than me, I guess...' "And... nobody has a **problem** with being treated like second-rate guard animals? You know, most dragons would only follow orders given from the demon lord himself, **personally**, and only with a considerable salary. How does he pay all of you?"

Sarhee stopped moving, and the three dragon siblings are shared a confused glance.

"Pay? Why would he need to pay us?" Sarhee asked, completely puzzled.

"Greken Lord feed us! We eat, we follow Greken Lord!" Lehjid crowed happily.

"Yeah, as long as we get food and a place to sleep, that is enough!" Kal agreed.

K gaped. "What are you, **poor** or something? What kind of dragon works for food and board?"

'Again, besides me,' he added mentally. Though in all fairness, K had EXTREMELY costly eating habits.

Sarhee continued walking deeper into the cavern as she thought over his comments, and K glanced about at a pair of adult fire drakes, one which was slumbering in a bed of bones and rock, and another that was grooming its scales within a sputtering magma flow.

"I suppose it seems strange when you try and work it out like that, but you get used to it," the redhead reasoned, shrugging. "I'm sure you'll understand when you meet Lord Greken."

K twitched as he was carried into a descending spiral staircase. "Why can't you explain it to me? Why do I just keep hearing 'Lord Greken' this and 'Master Dashtall' that? That fire drake didn't have a single gold coin among its bedding! That's unheard of! Do you have any idea that people outside this territory will actually PAY you to kill things? Like, in ADDITION to feeding you?"

Kal snorted, a burst of hot smoke blasting from his nostrils. "Hey sis, you sure that this one is one of ours? It asks too many questions."

"Nosy, nosy, shiny lizard!" Lehjid sang, snapping his jaws hungrily.

"Wh-What?" K asked as Sarhee held him up higher and looked him in the eyes suspiciously. "What are you talking about? I'm just trying to learn how things work, right? I wasn't born here, you know!"

"He's got a point," the female admitted, stepping out into another cavern framed by two thick, oozing waterfalls of molten rock on either wall. "But still, you might upset the overseer if you keep asking such questions. You don't want to upset the overseers."

"Uh... right..." K said nervously, wanting to change the subject. "Okay, so... you're all siblings, huh? So I assume none of those eggs back there were yours?"

Sarhee jolted backward, her face flushing. "What? Of course not! Do I look that old to you?"

K sweatdropped. "It's hard to tell in your human form; you could be twenty or twenty thousand, for all I know."

Sarhee frowned, but nodded reluctantly. "Okay, fine. I'm thirty. Ish."

"She's thirty-eight, by the humans' years," Kal hissed, rolling his eyes.

_WHAP!_ K winced as the younger drake suffered a powerful strike to his head, sending him to the ground in a daze.

'I've never heard of a dragon female being concerned about her age. She must read too many of those human magazines,' the metadragon reasoned. "So you're not even an adult, then. And your brothers must be even younger."

The redhead nodded firmly, still glaring at Kal. "These two are barely pups, not even two decades." She turned away from her sibling, sniffing haughtily. "They may be big from stuffing themselves constantly, but they're practically babies."

"That's good," said a new voice from behind her. "This is going to be a lot easier than I'd hoped."

Sarhee blinked. "Eh?"

_Shnk!_ K sweatdropped as Ranma flickered into view behind the dragons like a vengeful spirit, his eyes glowering as he clenched numerous small and mid-sized blades between his fingers. "Oh no..."

* * *

"I have to say... all things considered, I'm of mixed feelings about this turn of events," K mumbled, staring at the bleeding, mangled corpses of the two male drakes.

Knives, axes and swords decorated the cracked red hides of the brothers, though most of the weapons were rapidly melting from exposure to the lava-hot blood that was still spilling profusely onto the ground and slowly running off to the side of the cavern to fall into the magma flow.

Sarhee was in better shape, merely having her right arm impaled by a short sword in a strategic location and having Ranma's magic chain wrapped tight around her neck. Ranma was currently standing over her, one foot holding her good arm down, while he kept the chain taught with his right hand and held his katana to her chest with his left.

"You bastard! You'll die a thousand deaths for this!" The dragon in human form hissed, her eyes flaring. "Your suffering was assured the moment you stepped foot in here! You'll burn slowly, your flesh blister-URK!"

"Okay, yeah, fine," Ranma said irritably, yanking hard on the chain to shut up his captive. "Can we skip the threats, please? I'm kind of in a hurry, here."

"Besides, fire is probably not the best way to torture this guy," K added, dragging a broken longsword away from Kal's dead body.

"And you!" Sarhee snarled once she got her breath back. "You traitor! How dare you! You let this human in here to kill your brethren!"

"Technically, I'm a spy, not a traitor," K said firmly, "and while I don't feel comfortable with him butchering fellow dragons, I'm pretty sure the only alternative is you dragons butchering him, so..." Shrugging as best he could to avoid eye contact, the metadragon set upon the discarded weapon with his usual gusto, relishing the polished and expertly tempered steel.

The redhead turned back toward Ranma. "You coward! Ambushing children! Have you no shame?"

Ranma rolled his eyes. "Uh huh. Whatever. Those 'children' would've gladly slow-roasted me and torn me apart if I'd given 'em a chance. Are you out of desperate accusations yet? We need to move this along."

He stepped off of her, and then yanked the fire drake up onto her feet, if rather painfully. "Now I don't want to kill you, mostly 'cause you're disguised as a human girl and the weak, sappy little hero in me feels bad about hurting girls, but I don't want you to cause a lot of noise and alert the guards, either. Guess which is a bigger problem for me?"

Sarhee twitched, but said nothing.

"I think you get what I mean," the pigtailed man said, nodding. "Okay, now I want you to lead me into the fortress. I want you to tell me when I can expect to find any guards. If I run into any guards without any warning, then I'm going to use you to fight them. Either as a shield, or maybe a projectile. I haven't decided yet."

The fire drake grimaced, but nodded weakly.

"Hey, hey, come on dude, take it easy on her," K reasoned, flying up onto Ranma's shoulder. "I mean, okay, yes, she would and probably still will kill you if you let your guard down for even an eye blink, but you can cut her a little slack. In the chain, specifically."

Ranma considered this for a moment, and then sighed. "Fine. Hold still, Red."

"My name is SarAAAH!" The hapless dragon shouted in surprise as Ranma unwound the chain around her neck with a snap of his arm, only to swing his arm about and then bind her wrists together in the same motion.

"Sarah. Fine. Whatever," Ranma mumbled as he tightened the chain and then pushed the redhead forward. "Let's go, all right?"

Casting a final, despondent look at her fallen brothers, Sarah gestured weakly toward a passage behind the leftward magma flow and started forward, leading the martial artist and metadragon onward.

"So, human. Care to explain why you're sneaking into the most powerful military fortification on this pitiful realm? What can you hope to accomplish here?" Sarah asked slowly, trying to work out exactly how much she could taunt her captor without inciting retribution.

"It's kind of a survival thing. Ironic, I know," Ranma shrugged. "Also, my name is Ranma. Ring a bell, Sarah?"

The redhead frowned. "My name is Sarhee."

"That's stupid, so your name is Sarah now," Ranma said firmly. "Anyway, your boss has been using his pet dragons to hunt me down the last few weeks, and I'm fed up with it. This stops tonight, one way or another."

"So **you're** the human that everyone's been so worked up about?" Sarah asked, perplexed. "Impossible... you're nothing more than a boy... and a warrior rogue, at that! How could you have survived this long?"

"Us 'warrior rogues' are pretty good at that sort of thing," Ranma snapped. "But never mind that. You have heard of me after all, huh?"

"Heard of you? My mother died trying to kill you!" Sarah snapped angrily. "You filthy ape! You kill a whole flight of our kind, and then you dare to saunter into our nesting grounds and create more havoc?"

Ranma rolled his eyes. "Yeah, I'm a real villain. So, you wouldn't happen to know WHY Greken is so keen on killing me, would you?"

"You mean besides wiping out small armies and butchering our infant dragons?"

"Yeah, besides all that," Ranma followed, not missing a beat.

Sarah snorted. "I haven't the slightest. While you're certainly worth killing **now**, I can't imagine what prompted such an exhaustive hunt." Then she frowned. "Halt."

"What is it?" Ranma asked suspiciously, stopping as he eyed the exit at the end of the passage.

"There is a guard post there. Well, not so much a guard post as a place for the handlers to rest when not busy," Sarah mumbled reluctantly. "My point is, there are lizardmen there that will raise the alarm if you alert them."

The pigtailed man blinked, genuinely surprised that his captive had done as asked rather than hoping that Ranma was bluffing. "Oh. Right. Hold on."

With a flick of his wrist, the chains binding Sarah's arms suddenly unwound into long, open loops... which then wrapped around the redhead's entire body and then tightened.

"Hey! What are-"

Ranma silenced the aggravated dragon by clamping a hand over her mouth. "Quiet. This is just to keep you from doing anything stupid until I finish up, here. I can't leave you alone with K with only your hands bound."

After letting his reasoning sink in, he eventually took his hand away from Sarah's face and turned toward the exit, ignoring the fire dragon's heated glare.

And then, he vanished.

"Wh-What? Where did...?" Sarah gaped as she tried to pick up traces of magic in the air where her captor had been previously, but found nothing.

'Can't be an invisibility spell... but I can still smell him, and...'

Frowning deeply, she waddled about to face K. "What was that he just did? That wasn't a spell."

The metadragon shrugged. "Crazy Ninja magic. It uses 'key' or something like that. I dunno."

Sarah desperately wanted to know more on the topic, but reasoned that K sounded ill-informed about it. Besides, there were more important things to discuss.

"Then he is gone? Then please, get these chains off!"

K recoiled. "Whoa! Hey! Nuh-uh. I'm on his side, remember?"

"Then change sides!" The redhead said firmly. "To these humans, you're nothing more than a pet or a monster! You can't seriously side with them over your own kin!"

A vein popped up on K's head. "Okay, first of all? You're NOT my kin. You're a bunch of brainwashed fire drakes holed up in a cave who probably would've eaten me if I hadn't lied to you. Second of all? I don't side with 'humans'. I side with Ranma. He's the guy who saved me, he's the guy who's fed me, protected me, and taught me. You can go suck on an exhaust vent, because there's no way I'm turning against him so easily."

"Please! I'll do anything!" Sarah begged, struggling uselessly against the enchanted chains. "He'll kill me once he's done with me!"

"You see, I'm not too sure about that," K mumbled, scratching his neck idly. "But I AM sure that you'll take any chance you get to rip his throat out, so... again, no."

"But... Wait! I'll... I'll even-" Sarah began hesitantly, only to be interrupted from behind.

"He said NO, all right? Get over it," Ranma muttered irritably, walking up behind the startled fire dragon and grabbing hold of the chains that bound her.

"Wh-What? Why are you back so soon?" Sarah asked tactlessly, moving to follow as Ranma tugged her along.

"It didn't take that long," Ranma mumbled, stepping into the next room.

Sarah's face darkened as she followed him. The lizardmen that were in charge of caring for the young dragons were collapsed around a table, their blood pooling together underneath it. Each one was impaled through the back with its own weapon, and appeared to have died before it could even consider struggling.

"Lizardmen aren't the most cautious or sensitive monsters, so it's not too hard to sneak around them," Ranma explained as she unwrapped his chain from around Sarah.

"But... how... how did you... did you get them all at once? It looks like they were sitting all around the table."

"Yeah, I did," Ranma said, swinging his right arm briefly so that the bladed chain wound around his gauntlet before attaching itself properly with a satisfying snap.

"How?" The dragon asked nervously.

"Ancient Chinese secret," Ranma said sarcastically. "How many more posts like this are there between us and the fortress?"

"This was the only one. There's no formal guard detail in the back of the castle," Sarah explained, a slight grin creeping up onto her face. "Though there's no way you'll be able to enter."

Ranma raised an eyebrow, prompting the fire drake to elaborate.

"At that level the magma flows are so intense that the air is lethally hot to fragile humans like you! Even the lizardmen can barely tolerate the short walk from the main chamber to the fortress! You'd bake in an instant!"

The redhead smirked and shrugged even as Ranma started pushing her forward again, deeper into the volcano. "I'd love to help, but there's really nothing I can do. Human bodies are simply too weak, and I can't cast any magic on other people. Too bad!"

"Uh huh. Yeah, that's a real shame. This way, right?" Ranma asked, ignoring the girl.

"I'm serious!" Sarah growled, irritated that her captor didn't appear to be taking her seriously. "I mean, it's fine if you get yourself cooked, great, but I don't want you to get upset and kill me before you die!"

"Stop talking. It's annoying," Ranma said evenly, still prodding her along.

The fire dragon in human form fumed, but said nothing as she stalked down the descending corridors of the volcano. It became quite obvious very quickly that she had not been lying; the walls of the corridor became more and more jagged as the temperature steadily increased, and pools of magma poking up from the floor became more common. These pools frequently bubbled and popped, spraying molten rock all about the cavern and contributing to the slow destruction of the walls.

Sarah glanced behind her suspiciously as they descended to the bottom-most open chamber in the volcano, and was thoroughly alarmed to see her captor only tugging uncomfortably on his collar as small trickles of sweat dripped down his cheeks. Bizarrely, K seemed to be in worse shape, and was swaying unsteadily on Ranma's shoulder as he panted heavily.

"What's the hold up? Keep moving," Ranma snapped, well aware that the dragon girl expected him to collapse any moment. Thankfully, his training in Hyoken style had put him through worse temperatures than this, and would ultimately protect him from anything short of the magma. He was more concerned about K; he really had no idea how tolerant metadragons were to such extreme temperatures, though so far he was disappointed.

Sarah wordlessly walked down a thick stone bridge that stretched over the main magma vent, still glancing behind her every few seconds to make sure that Ranma wasn't on the verge of collapse. Despite her distraction, they made it to the other side in a few seconds, and the redhead slowly hauled open a reinforced iron door while Ranma and K waited behind her.

"K? Are you doing all right?" The pigtailed man asked, wondering if he should kick the fire dragon to make her move faster.

"I'm... ugh... I'm fine," K insisted dizzily. "Just not... used to this... heat, I think. Body's gotta... gotta adjust."

Sarah grimaced as she finished opening the door, once again remarking upon how Ranma's body seemed unharmed by the dangerous temperatures. "I... I thought you were human, but... what are you?"

"Oh, no, I'm human," Ranma insisted as he stepped into the fortress proper, "I'm just cool like that."

The redhead was hardly mollified by the response, though she didn't press the issue before closing the door behind them. "Oh, whatever... these inside halls are frequently traveled by guards and slaves, so you'll have to stay on your guard. I won't be able to predict when we'll run into somebody."

She had Ranma's attention immediately. "Slaves? Where?"

"All over. Lord Greken keeps a considerable domestic workforce of bound humans, as well as a few lycanthropes and trolls for entertainment. They regenerate almost as fast as they're hurt, so it makes for long pit fights. I guess he thinks it's funny."

"Yeah, fine. Any important spots around here?" Ranma asked, though he was only half-listening at the time. For some reason K still seemed groggy, despite the temperature returning to bearable levels.

"Important spots..." Sarah, who really hadn't expected the human to survive the trip down, grimaced. So far she had been willing to cooperate out of fear for her life, but what Ranma was demanding now would be a serious betrayal of her master's interests. The question was, were those interests more important than her life?

'I can't just... well... I guess I can... but there has to be another way! Somewhere where I can escape, and...'

Sarah blinked as she recalled one of the most important areas in the fortress. A room which offered both considerable defenses, an excellent escape route, and a value within the castle that would necessarily make it the target of any attack.

She tried to conceal her smirk as she turned toward an impatient-looking Ranma. "Yes. Fine. I will take you to the heart of the castle." The redhead immediately turned around and walked briskly down the hallway. "Follow me closely and stay quiet. If anyone sees us, they'll assume you belong here."

Ranma frowned as he did as instructed. A more insightful person would have been worried about how the young fire dragon was apparently taking charge of the situation, but Ranma had more important concerns. "Where are you taking me?"

"It's the portal to Kreech realm. The grends come from that plane, and Lord Greken has many contacts there, I hear," Sarah explained.

Ranma hesistated as a ragged-looking girl in dirty, if presentable clothing stepped out of a room in front of them, only to immediately flinch back from the small group and turn away.

Sarah took no notice of the slave, satisfied with the girl's actions. "We send and receive supplies and soldiers constantly through that gateway. While it's still open, reinforcements will always be merely seconds away."

She turned a corner at the end of the hall, and smirked slightly as she saw a massive pair of double-doors ahead, guarded by two lizardmen. "It's through here. This gate is the central key to the castle. It's the greatest military and commercial link Lord Greken commands. So long as it is active, this fortification will never fall."

Ignoring the odd looks that the lizardmen were giving her, Sarah strode forward purposefully, pushing open the doors and moving onward. She stepped out onto a large stone balcony attached to a flight of stairs, and gestured grandly to the sight that lay below.

An enormous steel ring floated above the ground, with a stone ramp placed up against it. Inlaid in the ring surface were a number of magical inscriptions, from large, ornate runes to tiny script that shimmered mysteriously. The entire structure was perpetually wreathed in sparkling blue energy, and even as Sarah approached the balcony, a pack saurus was emerging from the blue-white core, magical power flaring all around it.

"This is it. Lord Greken's master portal." Grinning, she turned around, her hair swaying majestically in the whirlwind of magical energies that filled the entire room. "So, human. Now that you're here, what... what will..." She blinked. "Human? That's strange..."

Ranma was, oddly enough, nowhere to be found, and from her current line of sight, Sarah could see that he wasn't lagging behind in the previous corridor, either.

"Where'd he go?" The redhead mumbled, turning back around and scanning the gate room carefully. "Did he turn invisible again and run off already?"

{"Why does that one keep talking to herself?"} One of the lizardmen guards hissed in his native tongue just loud enough for Sarah to hear.

The other guard shrugged. {"Kilua said that the young fire drakes seemed dumber than usual this latest generation. He thinks it may be inbreeding."}

A vein popped up on Sarah's head at the gossip, but she promptly counted to ten in her mind to calm herself before approaching the guards.

'I don't know where that human went, but I can't let him get away with what he's done,' she thought to herself. 'Wherever he is, I just know he's up to no good!'

* * *

"Are you serious? You're here to free us?"

Ranma nodded grimly from where he sat on a kitchen counter, staring down at the half-dozen slaves that he had interrupted from their early afternoon duties.

"Yeah, I'm serious. Look, I'm here to cause trouble for this Greken freak, and when I do, I'm going to see about carving a way out for everyone who's trapped in here. I just need to know if you're willing to take the chance to make a break for it when the time comes."

The two girls in the room, one of whom was the one Ranma had followed from the hallway, glanced at each other fearfully as the chef and his assistants mused the thought over.

The chef, a grizzled man that bore a number of scars all over his face and arms, leveled a very critical gaze at the pigtailed man. "Kid, I don't know who you think you are, but you're stuck in a massive fortress packed wall-to-wall with lizards of all shapes, sizes, abilities, and temperaments. In fact, the only thing they really have in common is that any one of them would love to rip you limb from limb and gnaw you down to the bones. What makes you think you could possibly cause enough of a ruckus to so much as wake up the night guardsmen, much less make a way out for us castle slaves to get away? I don't think it'll take them that long to eat you."

Ranma smirked, immediately liking the old man. He'd always had a fondness for gruff honest types. "I've done this sort of thing before. This is a slightly bigger scale than what I'm used to dealing with, but I have backup, this time."

The chef raised an eyebrow. "What kind of backup?"

"I'd rather not talk about that," Ranma deadpanned. "But listen. I want to get you guys out of here, but I need to know more about this Greken guy." His expression suddenly looked far more serious. "How does Greken control these dragons?"

"Control them?" One of the slave boys asked.

"Sure. I know all about dragons. I've fought them, fought with them, even fought for one of 'em, once. Not to mention that I've had one following me around constantly for the last few months." Ranma noted at this point that K was nowhere to be found, but shrugged it off immediately. It would be just like the metadragon to immediately dive into the nearest supply of metal tools, and if he was discovered, Ranma was reasonably sure no harm would come to him. "There's no way that this Greken guy just **convinced** this many dragons to work for him without pay. I need to know what's going on here."

"And if you did know how Greken does all that, what would you do about it?" The chef asked grimly, not noticing immediately as the rear door to the kitchen opened up behind the group.

Ranma hesitated. "Well... I..."

_Fwsh!_ Faster than any of the slaves could track, Ranma jumped off the counter and whirled about in mid-air, unleashing a single throwing knife that promptly lodged itself into the throat of the young grend that had just stepped into the kitchens.

"Hrk! Ghg!" The reptilian demon staggered forward, falling to its knees, and Ranma calmly walked over to the intruder as the younger slaves locked up in terror.

"I know that it doesn't seem like a reasonable bet, breaking out of here. I mean, whatever I say about it, your lives are on the line." Ranma stopped next to the grend, and then slowly unsheathed his katana. "I'm not gonna force you to do anything. But I'll do anything I can to help you get out of here."

Ranma resheathed his katana with a slight twitch of his wrist, and for a moment the slaves blinked, wondering why the pigtailed man had drawn a weapon without using it.

Then the grend's head rolled away from its neck and onto the floor, blood spilling out behind it.

"Hah!" The chef barked out a laugh at the sight, startling the other slaves. "Think you're something special, don't you? Well, all right! I was getting sick of this life, anyway! If I don't make it, no big loss on my part, eh?"

"That's... That's not really the attitude I'm looking for, but whatever works for you, I guess," Ranma mumbled, rubbing the back of his head.

"So, it's really happening, then? Is the revolution really here?" One of the slave girls asked, much to Ranma's confusion.

"Revolution? Well, it's more of a prison break, really..."

"Never mind that," the chef said suddenly. "Kima, you go to the quarters and inform the others that the time has arrived. Have Nathan take some men with him to the dungeons, while Timothy prepares to disable the guns."

Ranma blinked repeatedly. "Uh... really? Disabling guns? I'm not sure that's a good idea..."

The chef grinned and walked past Ranma, kicking aside the grend's corpse negligently. "Relax, boy. This has been a long time in the waiting. I'm just surprised that our opportunity came so soon."

Ranma frowned and followed the man out as the slaves left through the main entrance. "Wait, is there something I should know, here?"

"There's lots you should know, but I don't think it matters," the old man said gruffly. "All you have to do is make sure 'Lord' Greken has bigger problems than a handful of slaves running amok."

Ranma's frown deepened. "Uh huh... hold that thought."

Reaching into his pocket and rummaging around for a bit, Ranma quickly found the psychic crystal that Kaze had prepared.

"I actually should have gotten them on board a while ago, but whatever. With the hoverbikes they should be able to make it here in time to help," Ranma mumbled to himself as he removed the glove over his left hand, grasping the crystal with his bare hand.

_'Ah, this is going to be a complete disaster, I just know it. These men have no patience or sense, it's frustrating. And it doesn't help that Shikodan... hello? Master Saotome, is that you?'_

Ranma staggered for a moment as a cascade of thoughts, images, and scant flashes of memory assaulted his unprepared psyche. For a moment he was completely lost in a swirl of emotions and sensory input, utterly unable to determine which thoughts were his own and completely debilitated by the confusion.

"Boy? You all right?" The chef asked scepticaly.

"Just... Just a sec. I'm new to this. Give me a minute," Ranma muttered through clenched teeth, trying to calm down as parts of his mind which he THOUGHT were parts of his mind, but wasn't really sure, started to panic as he lost his grip on fleeting ideas that may or may not have been his.

_'Try to relax; the confusion to a non-psychic is considerable at first, but it will pass soon. It's best if you don't release the crystal, though. If you don't get acclimated, then we aren't going to get anywhere.'_

Ranma rubbed his head as he stood up, trying his best to push aside the confusion. 'Kaze! Listen! I need you and Rayden to get to the main fortress, pronto! I'm going to start something soon, and no matter how it turns out, I'm pretty much toast if I don't have someone on the outside to help me and the people in here escape!'

_'Ah. Yes. About that...'_

Images briefly flickered before Ranma's eyes, which he supposed might have explained the situation Kaze was currently experiencing if this whole psychic thing wasn't giving him such a headache.

_'It would seem that we were somewhat... headstrong in our own investigations.'_

'What, did they find out you guys were with me?' Ranma thought, slipping into a crouch as the chef waited impatiently.

_'Not at all. That became a moot point once Shikodan slaughtered an entire garrison and set the stage for a long-planned peasant rebellion.'_

Ranma sweatdropped. 'Oh. Well, as long as he's not fighting any dragons like I asked him.'

_'Miraculously enough, we've avoided any such battles. In any case, I can assure you, we are well on our way to assisting you... though the ultimate fate of our assault looks quite grim.'_

'Yeah, I was about to get to that, actually...' Ranma took a deep breath and stood up before addressing the chef again. "Hey, you never did tell me anything about how Greken controls the dragons. Do you know anything about that?"

The chef snorted, but smirked. "More than any human should, I assure you. Greken's secret is unknown to all but his closest associates... and a few slaves that happened to be in the wrong place at the right time." He barked out a laugh. "These reptiles think nothing at all of their servants! They'll chatter on about anything at all; they really think we're incapable of turning on them!"

"Yeah, well I think they'll learn their lesson tonight," Ranma mused. 'Koz, you getting this?'

_'Yes. Well, mostly, but... no! Shikodan, stop that! You can't set that off here! We're not close enough yet!'_

Ranma sweatdropped as the chef continued. "Anyway, the key is the Serpent's Heart. That's the source of Greken's power."

"The Serpent's Heart, huh? What and where is it?"

"I've never seen it, of course, but apparently it's an artifact that allows the wielder to control dragons. Permanently, yet. I have no idea how it works, but with this item Greken has turned legions of proud, decadent creatures into tame, loyal beasts of burden. Although still dragons in every way and still susceptible to the dragon's temper and lust for wealth, they happily quash their urges at Dashtall's feet."

"Damn," Ranma mumbled, rubbing his chin. "I was expecting something like that, but still... that's a pretty nifty toy."

The chef snorted. "More than that, it is the single most important component to Greken's reign." Suddenly the older man grasped Ranma by the shoulders. "Unfortunately, I don't know where the Heart is, though it's probably located here in the main fortress, in the sub-levels where no humans or even lizardmen are allowed. Greken knows nothing of subtlety or deceit, and would only place his most valued artifact behind the most powerful defenses." His grip on Ranma's shoulders tightened. "Please! You must find and seize the Heart so that we can turn his dragons on him! No army can possibly stand against Dashtall while his dragon legions remain loyal!"

"'Kay," Ranma said, utterly ruining the dramatic tension. "How do you get to the sub-levels?"

The chef was non-plussed by Ranma's apparent apathy, but continued along the path. "It's this way, near the throne room."

Ranma followed him, and once again turned his thoughts inward... or rather, outward, depending on how one thought of it. 'Kaze, did you get all that? Serpent's Heart, controls dragons, yadda yadda?'

_'Indeed. It is, like you say, the most obvious and likely scenario, though the idea that such an artifact actually exists boggles the mind. I would dearly like to study it after this is over.'_

'You can do whatever you want with it, but I need to know what you're planning, exactly. What are you throwing at the castle? They have artillery on the walls and salamanders at the gate. You know, besides all the dragon nests around here.'

There were several moments of mental silence as Ranma followed the chef down the stone hallway.

'Kaze? What, you don't even have a plan? Look, even something like "Shikodan will blast the walls and slay the salamanders while I summon some elementals within the castle to..." actually, that's a pretty good plan right there, now that I think about it. Why don't we go with that? Koz?'

It was about this time that Ranma realized that the infernal buzzing in his head had totally ceased; he hadn't noticed immediately, because he had been intentionally ignoring the confusing blur of memories and thoughts the moment he had learned to differentiate between his own thoughts and Kaze's and instead focused on the words that Kaze was sending to him intentionally. Now that he surrendered his mind to the crystal in his hand, however, he realized that it had suddenly stopped working.

'Did it run out of power? No... I don't think so...'

Ranma suddenly grabbed the chef's arm as he put away the crystal. "You need to leave. Now."

The man looked surprised, and then shook his head. "No, you needn't worry. These halls are very infrequently patrolled, and-"

"No, you don't understand," Ranma said harshly. "I need you to run in the opposite direction, and then scream at the first reptile you find that there's a strange guy with a pigtail wandering about the castle killing people. Hurry!"

The old man hesitated, but then he nodded grimly and turned around, dashing down the corridor.

Ranma, for his part, steeled himself and dashed down the other way, rearing his left hand back as he approached a thick, reinforced wooden door.

"DRAGON FIST!" _BWOOM!!_

A hail of burning splinters and cinders burst into the adjacent room, scattering over the rough carpet. The ki flames died quickly, failing to light the furnishings within the room, but the attack served to make a suitable impression as Ranma stalked purposefully through the doorway, smoke wafting off of his left arm.

"My, my. So this is the one, hmm?"

Ranma slowly looked from one end of the room to the other, taking in the area. It appeared to be a massive study, with bookcases lining the walls and arcane-looking items sitting in glass cases atop large desks.

Facing him were five people. One was Sarah, which was honestly the first thing he had expected. There were two others that were obviously dragons in human form, though he'd never seen them before; one was a tall, thin man with long black hair, and the other was a short boy with long, silvery hair. The other human-looking character, surprisingly enough, **was** apparently a human, though the way his hands were glowing in the midst of magical incantation indicated that he was still a threat.

Finally, there was the creature that Ranma assumed was his target; the biggest, most elaborately dressed grend he had ever seen, with a thick mane of spiky black hair, several large, delicately filed horns protruding from his skull, and a massive pair of long, slightly curved claws where his left arm should have been.

"So you must be the big fish around here, huh?" Ranma said casually, relaxing as he straightened. "I thought you'd be scarier-lookin'."

"I thought you'd be smarter," Dashtall said gruffly, his voice gravelly and somewhat hoarse. "Charging into my territory, infiltrating my strongest bastion... and you don't even have the sense to stay hidden once you're here."

Sarah chuckled. "His foolishness is extraordinary, you must admit."

A vein popped up on Ranma's head as he glared at the redhead. "You know, I didn't HAVE to let you live."

A vein popped up on Sarah's head as well, and the two growled at each other briefly.

Dashtall ignored the scuffle, and moved next to the shortest of the individuals. "Ah, but Sarhee-"

"Sarah," Ranma said suddenly, interrupting him. "Her name's Sarah."

"Oh. Sarah, then," Dashtall continued, not noticing as the fire drake in question sputtered indignantly in response. "Her assistance was ultimately unnecessary. Now that we have our little friend here."

Ranma raised an eyebrow at that, and the boy looked down at the floor, unwilling to make eye contact.

"With his assistance, your capture became inevitable. We were also made aware of your psychic communications, and your friends stirring up trouble in the villages. It was a simple matter to put an end to the former, and a sizeable wing of dragons will make short work of the latter."

Ranma blinked repeatedly as he stared at the boy. "Wait... K? Is that you?"

The boy flinched, and Dashtall chuckled darkly. "Surprised? Away from his own kind, my pet here was unable to grasp even the most rudimentary of his natural abilities. It was a simple matter to teach him to attain human form."

Ranma frowned deeply, crossing his arms over his chest. "So that's how it is, huh..."

K swallowed nervously, and then turned toward Dashtall. "Please! You'll spare him, won't you? He's no real threat to you now; there's no point in killing him!"

"No point? He killed most of my family!" Sarah snarled.

"Oh, shut up! That was totally legitimate!" K countered.

Dashtall laughed again, silencing both dragons. "Well, our new friend does have a point. Mister... Saotome, was it? You've delivered my dragon to me. You need only relinquish the guantlet on your hand, and I would consider that perhaps punishing you for your transgressions is more trouble than it's worth."

Ranma held up the mysterious gauntlet, allowing the gems set in it to glimmer in the light. "This thing? Why? What's so special about it?"

The demon lord snorted. "If you haven't even realized its potential power yet, then surely it's not worth your life."

"But for some reason... to YOU... it's worth the lives of dozens of dragons, right?" Ranma turned the piece of armor back and forth, observing it critically.

Dashtall's eyes narrowed. "I've set my terms. Surrender the guantlet and leave, or die where you stand."

Ranma hesitated for a moment, and then shrugged as he tugged the guantlet off.

"K," he said suddenly, causing the metadragon to flinch again, "you just sit tight. Everything's gonna be fine, all right?" He said, smiling.

Then Ranma casually tossed the guantlet toward Dashtall.

Nearly all of those opposite the pigtailed man relaxed as the piece of armor rolled about lazily in the air, all of them glad that they would not have to subdue the force that had so far eluded such extensive attempts at destruction and capture.

While both Sarah and K had both seen Ranma in action, and both saw the brief, almost unnoticeable signs of tension within the pigtailed boy's stance, it was Sarah that gasped out a warning the moment the guantlet had left Ranma's hand. Perhaps K, trapped as he was within Dashtall's influence, was fooling himself into thinking that everything would work out (mostly) peacefully, or maybe a small, unsubjugated part of his mind suppressed any reaction that might have betrayed his human friend.

However it happened, by the time Sarah's scream of "Watch out!" was processed by those present, Ranma was already crouched at Dashtall's feet, drawing his katana as he jumped straight up in front of the demon lord.

_Svash!_ Sparks and blood flew as the crippled, enchanted blade fought the polished, enchanted armor, and Dashtall staggered back as the tail end of the blow cut a deep gash through his jaw, and turned away as quickly as he could to gain distance from the sudden assault and allow his minions room to fight.

Ranma, for his part, vaulted off the side of a bookcase once he reached the apex of his jump, and landed a safe distance away, next to the main entrance to the study (rather than the one he had barged in through).

"Burn," he deadpanned, snapping his fingers.

_Fwoosh!_ All at once, the path Ranma had moved along during his attack suddenly lit aflame, hardly fazing Sarah and Dashtall, but badly startling K and the black-haired dragon, who were still trying to wrap their heads around the sudden turn of events.

"Get him!" Dashtall demanded, pointing his claws angrily at the young human. "Jansen! Seal those doors!" He called, turning toward his human aide and principal wizard.

The magus, in response, coughed up a bit of blood and fell forward onto his knees, clutching a single throwing knife that had somehow made it into his abdomen during all the confusion.

Snarling, Dashtall turned toward the most powerful of his current retinue, and pointed toward the black-haired dragon. "Vargus! Kill him! Do whatever you must!"

"As you wish!" The venom dragon growled, stepping through the quickly dying flames and sucking in a considerable amount of air.

_Hwoosh!_ A thick stream of sickly green mist burst from the man's mouth, whirling and expanding within the air as it rushed toward its target.

Ranma quickly jumped out of the way and grabbed onto a bookcase, clamping a loose cloth over his face to protect his eyes, nose and mouth even as the sickly cloud rushed toward the end of the room, breaking over the thick wooden doors leading into the main hall.

The doors promptly groaned and creaked as they began to rot and dissolve rapidly, great chunks of the barrier breaking off and crumbling to mush on the ground. The vapors had a similar effect on everything else in the room that was near to the initial blast but not in the way, though the results were less destructive.

Dashtall, in the meantime, searched the scorched ground for the guantlet, brightening as he found it lying on the edge of the book shelf behind him.

_Snap!_ Just as he reached for the item, the claws on the end of an enchanted chain darted in and clamped onto the fingers of the armored glove, snatching it out of the demon lord's grasp and back into Ranma's.

Ranma grabbed the guantlet with his free hand even as his chain weapon wound itself back around his forearm. "I'll take this for now," he mumbled through the cloth over his face. "If you want it, you're going to have to work for it, scaly."

Without further conversation or fanfare, Ranma sprinted out of the room through the damaged main entrance, barely avoiding several magical acid arrows that splashed dangerously across Dashtall's books.

"Vargus! With me! I want that rodent crushed!" Dashtall snapped, stomping forward through the noxious cloud.

"Wait! Lord Greken, allow me to help!" Sarah said, dashing forward to follow.

A glare over the grend's shoulder stopped her dead. "You've done quite enough, letting this rat in here. See to Jansen's injuries, you're not coming with us."

The redhead flinched, and bowed her head meekly as Vargus dashed by, his hands glowing a bright neon green as he prepared to unleash deadly magic.

"Damnation!" Sarah growled, her knuckles whitening as her superiors left. "How could this have happened? How could a meddlesome human cause so much trouble?"

"Well _Chomp!_ Ranma's pretty good at _Crunch!_ that sort of thing. _Gulp!_ We should probably be thankful we're still alive," K mumbled uneasily, swallowing a chunk of fine dwarven steel.

"That's not really a comforting..." Sarah trailed off as she glanced at her current companion. "Wait... what are you eating?"

"Nothing!" The silver-haired boy almost shouted, clasping his hands behind his back.

Sarah stared at K suspiciously, then glanced all around him before her eyes rested on an exquisite metal devil bookend behind the metadragon that she could have SWORN had a head a few minutes ago. "We should probably go. Carry Jansen for me, would you?"

"Yeah, okay."

* * *

"We use these tunnels below the villages to move quickly from territory to territory," explained a young man carrying a short spear as he gestured to the rough, cracking walls of the subterranean passage. "They were actually created by the earth and rock dragons and the wyrms when Greken first siezed control. Normally those passages collapse behind the creatures after a while, but because of all the magma flows, the tunnels usually filled with molten rock and then drained back down, leaving a good bit of solid, stable rock covering the walls and reinforcing them against collapse."

Behind the man were several men and a few women carrying assorted looted weaponry, with Rayden and Kaze at the head. Kaze was listening intently, considering the ramifications that the passageways could have on his overall strategy. Rayden had his hands in his pockets, obviously bored, and merely looked annoyed that his head kept scraping the ceiling.

"We mostly use them to move goods and supplies from town to town without being harassed by the guards or dragons. Some of the guards know about them, but they haven't bothered to do anything about them. Probably because the tunnels only lead to other parts of Greken's territory."

Kaze nodded slowly as Rayden yawned. "Wouldn't the tunnelers disrupt the tunnels, though?"

The man shook his head. "Not at all. The tunnels that kept poking into magma pools kept disrupting the volcanoes in the area, and he lost several wyrms that didn't burrow away from the encroaching magma fast enough. In addition to having lava spouts popping up after the dragons emerged, of course. So now the dragons aren't allowed to burrow inside of Greken's territory."

"Does that actually work?" Rayden asked suspiciously, grunting as his forehead banged into another chunk of rock hanging just slightly lower than the ceiling in general.

"Of course," the man said, "to the reptiles, Greken's orders are absolute."

_BWOOM!_ With timing that hardly surprised anybody, the wall of the tunnel ahead suddenly broke apart as something smashed its way through dirt and rock, though what emerged was initially obscured by dust and shrapnel.

"What in the-" the young man leading the group finished no more of his sentence as a pair of enormous, bony jaws closed around him, crushing his hapless body into a mess of splintered bone and shredded gore.

Rayden promptly jumped forward as the humans began screaming, but the monstrous wyrm's head retreated back where it came from before the demon knight could draw his sword.

"Dang. Well, at least I won't have to listen to him talk anymore," the dark paladin mumbled, stepping over to the new hole in the side of the tunnel.

"I thought he said they didn't travel through these tunnels!" One of the rebels complained, shaking nervously.

Kaze sighed. "I believe he's right. Given the speed of the attack, and the immediate retreat of the wyrm, it seems that we're being assaulted deliberately, not being harassed by a beast too stupid to understand its orders."

"Th-That's even worse! Do the lizards know we're coming?" Another fighter asked.

"Regardless, we must press on," Kaze said firmly, raising his staff as the ancient artifact lit the tunnel aglow with a soft yellow light.

"With that thing breaking in and snapping us up one by one?"

Kaze frowned. "Well, that's-"

"GRAAAUGH!!"

The various rebels flinched back as the wyrm reappeared with a horrendous roar, bursting out of the same hole it had come from previously and snapping fiercely at Rayden, who was still inspecting the breach.

Although Rayden had been somewhat expecting the psuedo-dragon's re-emergence, the Dread Knight wasn't able to leap clear before the wyrm clamped down onto his arm, digging its stalactite-like teeth into his skin.

"Gah! Oh, no you don't!" Rayden snarled, tugging his arm back and nearly dislocating the creature's jaw.

With a feral growl, the wyrm held on and began twisting its head left and right, digging backward to drag its prey back while at the same time preventing Rayden from getting the leverage needed to strike back.

"Hand of judgment, descend and smite the unworthy! Kai blade!" Kaze shouted, light coalescing around the Eye of Malakai before the evon swung his staff at the serpent's throat in an attack that resembled a halberd chop.

_SZVASH!_ The moment the orb at the head of the staff touched the wyrm's carapace, a blade of blazing white light appeared, ripping through the monster's armor-like scales and slicing easily through the layers of flesh and muscle underneath.

"SSSHREEEeeeeagh..." The wyrm's death cry trailed off into a whimpering hiss, and hot blood poured onto the floor of the tunnel as the spell ended.

Kaze smirked in satisfaction as Rayden continued struggling with the wyrm's jaws, which were still locked firmly over his arm, even in death. "There. That should make things much easier. As soon as you pull your hand out, we'll be able to continue, Shikodan."

_Crack!_ With an angry growl, followed by the sound of splintering bones, Rayden forced open the wyrm's mighty jaws and yanked his arm out.

Kaze promptly paled and started bigsweating as he stared at the clean-cut stump where Rayden's hand used to be.

"Eh heh... oops..." the white priest started to sweat nervously as Rayden's eyes narrowed and the humans behind them gaped. "I can totally fix that. Not even a problem. Just get your hand out, I'll have it good as new!"

"Why don't **you** get it out?" The Dread Knight deadpanned.

Kaze groaned in anticipation of the disgusting task before him, and rolled up his sleeves.

* * *

"This way, Master Greken!" Vargas dashed into the next room, his nose twitching faintly as he followed the scent of blood and sweat.

Dashtall angrily stomped after his servant, the demons dark, empty eyes searching the dungeon walls for his foe. "Vargus! Do not get too far ahead! The monkey's target is me!"

"Of course, Master!" The venom dragon replied, slowing as he entered the next room.

In the labyrinthine lower halls of Greken's fortress, it had not taken long for Ranma to elude his reptilian enemies. Though Vargus perhaps was capable of properly giving chase, the disguised dragon diligently waited for his much slower master to catch up to ensure they weren't separated and vulnerable.

Greken, of course, grew more anxious as they continued through the fortress. Tracking Ranma wasn't hard, mostly because this area had normal guard patrols, and nearly every room had wild streaks of blood surrounding the corpses of unfortunate armored grends.

No, what made the demon lord nervous was that the human upstart seemed to have a vague idea of where he was going.

"Wait!" Vargus said suddenly, stopping before another doorway as Dashtall walked up behind him carefully. "Something is... amiss."

Eyes narrowing, the dragon glanced down at his feet, and smirked as he saw a thin metal wire strung taught across the path, almost invisible in the dim torchlight.

"Ha! The human thinks he's clever!" Vargus barked, backing up and then blowing a bit of acid onto the wire to dissolve it through.

_Bwoom!_ The claymore mine on the other side of the wall detonated fruitlessly, and Vargus promptly stepped forward again into the smoke.

"I can't see any more traps here, Master. I believe it's-"

_Zash!_ A blindingly fast sword stroke came down onto the venom dragon from above, and only the perfect combination of ultra-fine senses and expert combat reflexes kept Vargus from being decapitated.

"Hrgh!" Ignoring the deep cut into his collarbone, Vargus instantly underwent a partial transformation, and Ranma couldn't manage to leap away in time before a thick, black, scaly tail smashed him to the side.

Ultimately the blow was minor, and Ranma rolled to his feet before darting away through one of the two exits in the room besides the one from which he had entered.

Vargus was about to give chase, but hesitated as Dashtall stepped in behind him. "Relax. He'll be back here soon," the grend lord said darkly, chuckling. "That path leads to the white wyrm spawning ground, and nothing else. Ready yourself for..."

The demon lord trailed off as he watched Ranma drop from the ceiling in front of him, and then dash out the other exit.

"Wait... but... what did..."

Dashtall gaped for several moments before Vargus shook his head. "Master, we should pursue!"

To the venom dragon's surprise, his lord hesitated. "Master? We must hurry! He may not know the way, but if we afford him extra time, he can set more traps for us and continue to kill the guards!"

Dashtall was silent for several moments, and then stepped forward. "Vargus. Hold here."

The venom dragon blinked, astonished. "Master Greken?"

"I'll pursue the human myself. I want you to lie in waiting here; be ready to kill him if I drive him back out."

The raven-haired serpent king stuttered helplessly as the demon lord stalked past him. "But... But Master-"

"Those are my orders!" Dashtall snapped. "I will not tolerate disobedience! There are articles in there too... sensitive for your bumbling attacks. Wait here!"

The venom dragon bowed weakly, frowning deeply as he watched his master pass through the next doorway, eventually vanishing within the halls.

"Relent, human! Nothing awaits you here except death and suffering!" Dashtall growled, shouldering into another small room lined with sacks of grain salted meats.

"Hurk!" The death gasp of another grend attracted his attention, and the demon lord glanced to his right as he saw another guard's corpse roll in front of the doorway.

With a contemptuous sniff, Dashtall stomped forward, stepping into the next room and standing at the ready, with his shoulders squared.

"You really don't know the meaning of 'subtle,' do you?" Said Ranma's voice, though the grend lord couldn't see his enemy. "You built this winding maze of a dungeon, but you only place guards on one of the routes that lead deeper into it. Makes it hard to get lost."

The grend made a growling noise deep in the back of his throat, though he didn't step further into the room, unwilling to leave his back exposed. "Stop talking and show yourself, coward!"

"Calm down there, scaly. You might not be willing to tell me what the deal is with the glove, but that's okay. I heard you've got a much more interesting toy down here."

Dashtall's breath caught as his suspicions were confirmed. "How do you know about that? Who is the traitor?!"

"That's not important. Oh, hey! I see you didn't bring along your dragon friend! Why's that? Maybe he doesn't know he's being mind-controlled? Yeah, I guess that might be a problem, then."

Honestly, Dashtall didn't know whether the knowledge that the dragons were being controlled would influence the control itself, but he had been very careful to ensure that the point would be moot. The Dragon's Heart didn't require that the user be holding onto the gem to utilize its power, nor that the affected dragon be in its presence, and despite having an excellent grasp of the artifact's functions, Dashtall knew very little about how it worked, and so had always chosen to err on the side of caution.

The demon lord took several deep sniffs of the air, and then cautiously began moving to the right.

"I mean, dragons are pretty smart, right? And I know magical compulsion only goes so far. So I wonder if-"

Ranma's musings were silenced as Dashtall thrust a claw deep into an empty barrel, shattering the container instantly and sending the martial artist tumbling away in a dodge.

"No more games," Dashtall snarled, his form glowing with a dark red aura. "Perish."

Without another word, the demon lord spat out a cloud of rust-colored dust, and Ranma stepped away as the vapors struck the wall and spread, a few wisps grazing his arm.

"H-Hey! What the heck?" At the barest touch of the strange mist, the fibers of his leather shirtsleeve dried to a brittle crisp and started cracking, and Ranma quickly darted away and into the next room to avoid any exposure to his skin.

"There's no escape. Every drop of moisture in you will be sapped away, leaving only a pile of dust and bones," Dashtall snarled, stomping forward to follow his opponent.

'Absorbs moisture? Dang, I thought he'd just breathe fire or something,' Ranma thought in irritation as he turned the corner into the next room.

"There he is!" Growled a different grend, this one apparently leading a contingent of guards ten strong in the cramped corridors of the dungeon.

"Huh. And here I was starting to think you guys didn't have an alarm at all," Ranma mumbled, turning around as Dashtall reached the entryway, blocking any possible retreat.

Despite being outnumbered, Ranma smirked and rested a hand on his sword hilt. "So? Come on, hurry up! If you don't move, then I will!"

The guards, eager as they were to charge the human upstart, hesitated as they waited for a signal from their lord.

Dashtall made no move to indulge the human's taunts, and sucked in his breath before blowing another cloud of the moisture-absorbing vapors at his target, knowing that his foe would have nowhere to evade without diving onto his soldiers' weapons.

'Thought he'd try that. Well, only got one chance at this...' Focusing his ki tightly through the rusty, enchanted blade, Ranma created a series of swirling vibrations in the space between the blade and the sheath.

_Shwsh!_ Drawing the blade in an incredibly fast motion, he caused the swirling energies to erupt from the sheath as small, tightly controlled whirlwind, sucking most of the mist into the small vacuum within the sheath.

_Chnk!_ Ranma rapidly sheathed his sword again, and then turned toward the guards blocking his path even as the hardened leather of his scabbard started to crack audibly. "Hope this works!"

Then he drew his sword once again, slashing toward the ranks of large, bulky demons and sending the rust-colored mist wafting into them.

Dashtall gaped as his warriors recoiled, and then started to collapse in agony. The effects of his attack were immediate and brutal; though grends were hardy and resilient compared even to lizardmen, the demons still couldn't handle the damage as their eyes and skin shriveled and cracked. After a few seconds, the guards at the front of the formation keeled forward as their blood dried in their veins, the moisture being leeched out through crumbling flesh.

Ranma grimaced as well at the sight, and idly scratched at the few patches of his own skin where stray wisps of the lethal mist had grazed.

"Human filth! DIE!!" Dashtall screamed, charging forward while Ranma was still unable to escape through the tunnel without passing through the red mist.

Ranma met the demon lord's charge, blocking the fall of the grend's massive talons with the disputed gauntlet, and nearly felt his bones crack as a result, the impact blowing away the scant remains of the rust-colored vapors. Ranma's counterattack stabbed a dagger into the demon's right bicep, but the grend's thick skin prevented him from sticking the blade too deep before he was forced to jump away from a lunge with the other arm.

Dashtall muscled forward immediately, swiping wildly with claws and his great, meaty fist as Ranma ducked and weaved through the powerful blows. The martial artist saw several openings that could have been used to land a critical strike on the demon's face, but he reasoned that any attack he made for the head could prompt another blast of the strange, dangerous mist before he could get away. The rest of the creature, meanwhile, looked too tough and well-armored for Ranma to put down easily fighting head-to-head like they were.

"Dragon fist!" Ranma suddenly shouted, throwing forward his left hand and shattering the nearby floors and walls as Dashtall braced himself against the enormous force of Ranma's special technique.

With the demon lord stunned, though not obviously injured, Ranma turned and leapt over the collapsed guards, of which only four were still writhing about, having survived the dissipated fumes from their master.

Dasthall snarled and charged forward, trampling his minions heedlessly in his rush to close with his opponent.

Ranma, for his part, dashed into the guard barracks on this level and then blasted open the lock on the door at the other end before kicking it open, pushing forward as the sound of shattering wood and steel scraping stone followed behind him.

"Huh. I **think** this is the place," Ranma mumbled to himself, sweatdropping. The room was fairly large and dank, with thick armor plating over the rock walls to prevent any subterranean entry, and a number of magical runes scratched into gems, probably to discourage any supernatural entry as well. At the end of the room, resting on a thick, rune-inscribed pillar, was a large crystal sphere slightly bigger than Kaze's Eye of Malakai, with the interior a glittering cascade of red and orange.

Obviously, any half-wit with Ranma's briefing on the artifact would have assumed that the orb was the Dragon's Heart, but Dashtall had thoughtfully eliminated all doubt by placing numerous signs around it in various languages proclaiming [Danger! Do not touch!] [Warning! Powerful magic item!] and [Management is not responsible for death or dismemberment resulting from manipulation or mishandling of this object. You have been warned!]

_Clomp!_ The sound of Dashtall's iron-clad feet resounded through the room as he pushed his way through the damaged doorway, a low growl escaping his throat.

Ranma merely walked across the length of the room, unhooking the chain on his right arm and swinging it about in a lazy circle. "Well, this is it, then? Game over, lizard. You had a nice run, but you should've thought twice before hunting **me** down."

With a casual flick of his wrist, Ranma sent the chain on his right arm sailing toward the gem, the claws at the end yawning open in preparation to grasp its target.

_Bzap!_ Ranma blinked as the claw bounced uselessly off of a shimmering field of light that appeared around the pedestal. "Eh?"

_Fzash!_ All around Ranma, great sparks of white light began flashing as the runes all over the room began to glow, causing a powerful tingly sensation to run through the pigtailed man. "Wh-What the heck?"

Dashtall snorted and then chuckled darkly as he stepped into the carpet of glittering magical energies, apparently immune to their effects. "You fool. Did you really think I would have only mundane defenses to protect my most vital artifact? I paid a hefty price for the spells that protect this room; the finest and most powerful of sorcerous traps. It is testament to your power that you're merely paralyzed rather than dead."

Ranma remained still as the demon lord walked up behind him, and twitched slightly as Dashtall raised his claw in the air.

"Look on the bright side, thief! You're too dangerous to leave alive to torture, so I'll grant you a quick death!" With that final taunt, Dashtall brought his blade down.

_Crack!_ The twin blades attached to the grend's right arm shattered rock like plywood as it tore into the dungeon floor, creating a spider web of cracks all around the point of impact from the sheer force behind the attack.

Which was all well and good, except that it had missed its target.

"GRAUGH!!" Dashtall screamed and lurched forward as a dagger penetrated deep into the back of his neck, and he swung his claw around in a wild backhand that Ranma ducked under with ease.

The pigtailed man hopped backward as the demon lord lunged for him wildly again, still remaining on the defensive. "Heh. Nice try, but that sort of magic doesn't work on me."

"How?" Dashtall snarled. "An anti-magic field? Dispel talismans? It's impossible!" He lurched forward again on the attack, tearing a great, long gouge all across the wall as Ranma sprinted away from the rampaging demon.

"It doesn't matter!" The grend declared. "You'll never get past the barrier! Reinforcements are coming to finish you off, no matter how long you may elude me!"

Ranma did have to admit that constantly dodging was getting tiring, especially after everything he had done to get this far. The prospects of more strong, tough, lumbering demons getting in his way was an abysmal thought as well. But honestly, Ranma didn't have any way of reliably taking down the shield so long as he had a powerful and competent opponent waiting for a good chance to eviscerate him.

"Well, then..." Ranma mumbled, drawing his pistol and ejecting the current magazine onto the floor. "Let's try this!"

Fiddling with a pouch on his belt, Ranma withdrew another gun magazine, this one with a detailed label in Hebrew stamped on the side.

Dashtall snorted and flexed his arm, causing a magic circle to appear around it and spin around his wrist briefly before coalescing into a large buckler of yellow, translucent energy.

"You really think that'll help?" Ranma asked smugly. "These are shield-breaker bullets, scaly."

"Try me, human," the demon lord snarled, stepping closer with his shield at the ready. Honestly his skin was thick enough to take most small-arms fire, and additional magical protections turned gunshots into mere pinpricks. Still, his enemy was nothing if not resourceful, and Dashtall didn't want to take any unnecessary risks at this stage in the conflict.

Ranma hesitated for a moment, sensing Dashtall's diminishing rage as the grend settled into a more serious combat stance. No longer was the demon prince treating his foe like a slippery rodent to be chased down, cornered, and eventually crushed, but rather the grend was focusing his mind and body in preparation for serious combat against a warrior of equal merit. Dashtall was now ready to fight.

Ranma didn't want anything to do with that, so instead he simply aimed his Nighthawk at the Dragon's Heart and fired off a round.

_CRACK!_ The barrier flickered as the mithril-tipped projectile caused a brief but correctable flux in the magic barrier's feed pattern just long enough for the bullet to slip through and burrow deep into the glassy surface of the artifact. Then the bullet's explosive head burst, causing the orb to shatter outward in a shower glimmering red glass.

"What... What did..." Dashtall staggered and gaped, his eyes growing wide. "No... Why? Why did you..."

Ranma sighed and lowered his weapon. "Well, it was either shoot the damn thing or have it out with you, and it just seemed like the better decision," the pigtailed man explained, shrugging.

"You idiot! Do you have any idea what you've done?!" The demon lord snarled, standing up to his full height once again. "Dozens of dragons will tear apart these lands for weeks! Nothing will be spared! Without some manner of control, they'll kill everything!"

Ranma blinked, and then frowned. "Well, you really should have thought of that before you stuck that many hungry lizards in the same area, huh? Does the phrase 'backup plan' mean anything to you?"

"Is this what you've come to accomplish? To ensure that these beasts rampage across your puny world at random rather than under my will?" The demon lord demanded.

"Well... not really, but honestly, I would actually prefer to see them killing innocent people of their own free will than under your orders," the pigtailed man mumbled, rubbing the back of his head. "Although you do have a point. I should probably see about getting your slaves to safety."

Dashtall promptly moved to attack the pigtailed man in a fit of rage, and then thought better of it, turning and sprinting out of the room.

'This is impossible! How could this have happened? A legacy of thousands of years, shattered in an hour! The gate. If I can get to the gate, I'll be safe.' The demon lord thought, his mind now focused on survival. Dashtall knew that finding his way to the portal was his only chance to live; though his army was loyal, and would enter battle even against a far superior force, dragons were (or rather, had been) the core of his forces, and all his strategies and formations relied upon the serpent kings.

At present, the only possibility for escape lay in the fact that the dragons would likely fall upon each other before they began actively destroying the countryside; although the creatures had all been enslaved as a race, Dashtall had captured and bred many violent breeds, some with ancient and instinctive emnity for the other dragons that they were forced to live with. Others were extremely susceptible to the usual draconic vanity and individualism that was common in the species, and held vicious feuds with their compatriots that were held in check only by the absolute power of mental domination. No longer.

Lastly, there were the numerous pseudo-dragons. Unlike normal dragons, they were generally unintelligent and bestial, and their loyalty and behavior came much more from their training than from the Dragon's Heart. He expected that the numerous wyrms, salamanders, saurus, and monster terrapins would stand with his army to defend the fortresses. But it would not be enough.

"So, where you going?" Ranma asked, jogging alongside the demon lord as the massive grend ran full speed through the blood-slicked passageways of the dungeon.

A vein popped up on Dashtall's head, and he took a quick, futile swipe at the irritating human. "Begone, pest! You've destroyed an empire millennia in the making, have you not done enough?"

"Not really. I was kinda hoping to free all your servants, too," Ranma explained, ducking under the clumsy attack. A moment later he heard a distant explosion, and bits of dirt and dust fell from the ceiling due to a slight tremor.

"Do what you will! I have lost here!" Dashtall snarled as he turned the corner and practically leapt out of another doorway. "But I have many allies and resources, yet! I will return to hunt you down some day, human! You have not heard the last of me!"

"Yes," said a deep, hate-filled voice, "he has."

Before Dashtall could recognize who had spoken - for he'd never heard Vargus take that sort of tone in his presence - a thick black tail tipped with a needle-thin stinger harder than steel darted into the demon lord's flank, stabbing deep into his side and delivering its deadly payload of toxins.

Dashtall gasped painfully, and then swept his clawed arm to one side, cleaving the armored tendril off in a spray of hot blood mixed with oozing poison.

"Gyaah!" Off to the side, Vargus leapt back as he retracted the stump where his tail used to be, but smiled through the pain as Dashtall stood in place, trembling painfully with the venomous stinger still lodged in his body. "Heh. A nice final gesture, but this is it, 'Master'. At last, you'll face the consequences of your hubris."

"Hngh... ghhg... Va... Vargugh..." Dashtall stuttered, blood and spittle leaking from his mouth.

The venom dragon morphed away his tail, hiding the wound as he reverted to his fully human form. "I must admit, the grends' constitution is incredible. A human's insides would have melted into soup almost instantly. You seem to be recovering from a harsh, but brief paralysis." He grinned sadistically as his fingernails extended into long, black talons. "I'm glad! It would be far too easy were you to die quickly after the centuries of insults you've heaped upon me! I'll be sure to make your end painful, but don't worry, I won't take too long! Can't have some other dragon wandering in and finishing you off! That is an honor reserved for me, your most... 'favored' servant!" By now the disguised dragon's lips were twisted in a hateful sneer, baring teeth that slowly morphed from being squat and flat to being sharp and curved.

Vargus was just about to begin his bloody work when Ranma placed a hand on his shoulder.

"So... we're cool though, right?" The pigtailed man asked.

Vargus stared at him like one would stare at an ant that had crawled up onto one's shoes.

"I mean, I did free you, after all," Ranma reasoned. "And I didn't kill the big lizard back there. Totally could have, you know. But I figured you guys would want a piece of him, so..."

Vargus' eyebrow twitched. "I... will pretend I didn't see you."

"Gee, thanks," Ranma deadpanned, walking past the vemon dragon. "Ingrate."

Vargus merely snorted, allowing the comment to slide; as insults went, it was rather tame, and admittedly quite accurate.

"Now, Dashtall," Vargus said excitedly, stalking toward the demon lord with his claws wiggling in anticipation, "you're ALL MINE..."

Dashtall twitched several times, unable to move his body. "Da... Da... DAMN YOU, HUMAAAAAAAN!!"

* * *

"I... I don't believe this," Sarah mumbled to herself, holding her head as if in the midst of a migraine. "What's going on? It's like some sort of... epiphany... or..."

_Bwoom!_ An explosion outside was followed by a titanic roar, which was in turn followed by several crashing noises.

"Yes! He did it! Ranma actually did it!" K cheered, jumping up and down and waving his arms about. "Thank the gods!"

"Everything's so clear now... or rather... I've realized that everything before was so murky..." The fire dragon looked at her hands - soft and dextrous, in her human form - as if in wonder. "This... This is... freedom?"

"Pretty much, yeah," K said happily, flinching slightly as another explosion caused the room to shake. "Usually freedom isn't accompanied by so much violence, but honestly, this isn't that bad."

There was a long moment of silence as Sarah continued to stare at nothing, dumbfounded, and K stared at her, considering.

"Sooooo..." the metadragon finally mumbled, clasping his hands behind his back. "... Wanna make out?"

The fire drake turned to glare at him venomously, her eyes turning a pitch black.

K immediately flinched away. "Okay, just wondering!" Then he coughed into his fist. "If that's the case, though, I should really get back to my friends."

"What should I do?" Sarah asked, frowning deeply. For some reason, asking another creature that seemed wrong, as if the thought was offensive to her sensibilities. But realistically, Sarah just had no idea what to do with herself anymore. She had nothing, had no-one, and her future that had seemed unquestionable just minutes ago was a blank slate. She was bereft of everything, save a false name given to her by an uncreative invader who didn't feel like pronouncing her real one.

"Well, I'd recommend either flying the hell out of here, or hiding in a lava flow," K responded, his body glowing as he shrank into his draconic form. "Things are already getting pretty crazy out there, and I think it's only going to get worse."

As if in response to that prediction, a wyvern fell screaming right by the window, blood trailing from a savage wound to its wings as it plummeted into the lava moat around the fortress.

"Can... Can I..." Sarah chewed on her lip nervously. "Can I go with you?"

K stopped dead at the request, utterly confused. Not to mention a little put off, since the redhead had refused his earlier advances. "With me? Nah. No good." He smirked. "If it were up to me, sure, no problem. But it's impossible. Ranma hates dragons." With that, the metadragon hopped into the air and took off down the hall, gaining altitude quickly to fly over a squad of lizardmen that were running in a mad dash in the opposite direction.

Sarah contemplated attacking the lizardmen briefly before turning away from the door, her head hanging. All told, she didn't have much of an appetite for violence, at least compared to most of her kind, and having been born into Greken's service, she didn't feel much of an urge to rebel so much as just leave. But leave where?

She contemplated this for a few moments (ignoring a sudden drop in temperature as a patch of ice appeared spontaneously over the window and outside wall) before she jerked to attention. "Wait a minute... 'hates dragons'? What?"

* * *

Ranma, meanwhile, was fuming none-too-silently as he walked out of the lower levels and stepped into the throne room of the late demon lord Dashtall.

"Really? 'Human'? That's what he shouts out in his last moments? That is BEYOND weak. What kind of idiot starts a hunt like that for someone and doesn't even remember their name when they're screaming dramatically?"

Ranma stepped to the side to get around a cluster of lizardmen who were thrusting halberds desperately into the iron-hard, glittering carapace of a crystal dragon, which snarled triumphantly as it simply stamped its way forward, crushing the lesser reptilians underfoot.

The pigtailed man stopped as the creature let out a blast of energy into the guards' diminishing ranks, blasting a line straight through the hapless reptiles.

"Ewww... there's blood and guts everywhere," the pigtailed man complained, staring distastefully at the veritable carpet of crushed guards that stretched from the shattered throne room entrance to the great, lavishly decorated halls.

The crystal dragon started to continue his rampage (despite the lizardmen's rapidly faltering courage to hold the line), but then stopped, noticing a small, non-reptilian creature at its side which seemed to be staring at the floor in disgust and generally pretending like he wasn't standing next to a twenty-ton killing machine.

It's eyes narrowing, the serpent king curved its long neck to bring its head around, and opened its jaws to reveal rows of perfectly angled, blade-like teeth that sparkled like diamonds.

The human glanced behind him, his expression stern. "Stop."

The crystal dragon blinked in surprise.

"I'm serious," Ranma deadpanned. "Just knock it off, all right? You have plenty of things to kill here. Neither of us need the trouble."

The crystal dragon's head backed away slightly, its beak twisting into something akin to a frown as it considered the human's words.

_Crack!_ About that time, a lucky strike from a particularly brave lizardman broke through its armor, and the serpent king turned its full attention back toward the reptilian defenders, putting the issue of the strangely defiant human aside in the meantime.

Ranma gingerly stepped through the mess in the throne room, trying to make his way over the few patches of carpet that were still clean, or had pieces of rubble or lizardman that were relatively dry. He could have leapt over the mess, or done something really fancy like use his chain to swing from the ceiling, but honestly the martial artist didn't feel up to it; as far as he was concerned, his quest was already over, meaning that he had to find his teammates, raid the nearest treasure room, and then find someplace to rest.

"HRAAAAAH!!" A painfully loud hiss had Ranma scrambling out of the way as a lesser salamander plowed through the splintered remains of the throne room doorway, flame sputtering from its mouth as it charged into the crystal dragon's rear.

"Geez, they're really going all out," Ranma mumbled to himself as he walked out into the hallway, glancing about at the different routes through the castle. "Let's see... I don't really want to go back the way I came... but if I go out the front, I'll have to go through the battle, probably. And this way leads..." Ranma blinked as he saw a familiar shiny shape darting toward him through the sky.

"Oh, hi K. You feeling bet-"

_Clang!_ Ranma winced at the metadragon's attempt at a full-body glomp as K latched onto his head, wrapping claws, wings, and tail around the pigtailed man's face in a suffocating hug.

"Ranma! You did it! You are AWESOME! Seriously! The best! I'm so sorry! I didn't want them to hurt you, but I couldn't help it! I don't know what happened! I just couldn't disobey Greken and I'm so happy you're all right and-"

_Clank!_ K's voice stopped as Ranma raised his arm up and clamped his beak shut.

"K. It's fine," Ranma mumbled through his metallic pet. "Now let go, please. I'm not hurt too bad, but I'm very tired, and we need to get out of here." Behind him, a great chunk of the salamander's torso hit the floor messily, splashing lava-hot blood all over the assorted rubble and lighting the carpets ablaze.

K sniffled briefly and then released Ranma's head, moving over to settle on the pigtailed man's shoulder, tears still hanging at the corners of his eyes.

Ranma started down the hall again, and then stopped. "Hey... did you gain weight? You seem heavier. And bigger, now that I think about it."

K cleared his throat of the last few thankful sobs he had stored up for the moment of reunion with his human friend. "Yeah, that's... well, I learned a lot in my brief enslavement, so my metabolism is running a bit better now."

Ranma nodded pleasantly, stopping briefly in front of a column of rapidly approaching grends. "Does that mean you won't eat as much anymore?"

_CRASH!_ The outside wall suddenly burst inward as the jaws of a massive black dragon crashed through stone and steel, snapping up several of the reptilian demons and sweeping aside the rest.

"Uh... that didn't really come up," K said awkwardly as the remaining grends scattered toward the inner rooms, moving away from the outer wall.

The moment they were gone, Ranma started up again, continuing toward the main hall. "Do you know where Rayden and Kaze are?"

"Not exactly, though I think they're somewhere nearby," K mused. "Right before the mind control broke, the ammo supplies of those artillery cannons on the walls blew up somehow. At the same time, I heard someone shouting about an attack from the supply tunnels. The guards were already panicking when the dragons went wild."

"Huh. I hope the slaves got out okay," Ranma mumbled, climbing over a pile of burning rubble that had fallen in his path.

As he climbed down the other side, which was entirely aflame, Ranma glanced around at the damage in the immediate area, ignoring the fire raging all around him. "Ray SHOULD have gotten here by now... but I don't see many signs of him being around. His spells are pretty... high-yield, you know? And loud."

"That's true," K admitted as Ranma approached the mostly-intact doors to the main hall. "Even in a free-for-all like this, he'd kind of stand out."

Ranma opened the doors to the main hall, and then blinked as he stared down the wide passageway that led to the Kreech portal. "Hi, Ray."

"Hey, Ranma," Rayden grunted back. The Dread Knight was looking almost painfully bored, which probably had to do with being stuck holding a sign that said +Greken army retreat this way: Hang right and enter portal+ rather than being involved in the large-scale battle surrounding him.

Ranma pointed at the sign. "Was that Kaze's idea?" He hadn't known Kaze for very long, but the evon's plans had a very distinct nature: arcane and mystical in some aspects, and in others, simple almost to the point of stupidity.

Rayden nodded grumpily.

"Is it working?" K asked skeptically.

"SHREEAH!" A holy dragon and a yellow drake rounded the corner at the far end of the hall, and both shrieked angrily at the humans (and metadragon) gathered in the hallway before they charged.

Both slowed considerably as they approached, both of them being distracted by the sign and reading it.

Immediately the dragons' attentions were refocused elsewhere, and the yellow drake actually shoved the snake-like holy dragon into the wall as it shouldered its way ahead, stepping around the humans in its path.

"Never mind," K mumbled.

"Hmph. Kaze said it was important to get as many of the big lizards into the gateway before he collapses it; I think he's already set a spell in there." Then Rayden gave Ranma a pleading look. "Can... Can I kill the dragons now?" The partially-trampled holy dragon stopped to give the Dread Knight a strange look, but then dismissed the creature and moved on.

Ranma wanted to say no. He really did. He was tired, and the last thing he needed was for Rayden to drag down the group getting stuck in long, brutal fights with creatures thirty times his size.

But the expression on the demon knight's face was just so honestly pathetic, the pigtailed man felt compelled to relent just out of sheer sympathy.

"... One. JUST ONE," Ranma said warningly, feeling a confused mix of satisfaction and unease as the dark paladin's face lit up.

"YES! Die, scaly freak!" Rayden screamed, alarming the holy dragon that had just passed by as he tossed the sign away in favor of his blade and attacked.

Ranma immediately turned away from the resulting maelstrom of roars, curses, and flickering magics, and he rubbed his head. "Okay, so where's Kaze? We seriously need to get going, here."

"REEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!" A tremendous roar from the shadow dragon nesting atop the fortress split the late afternoon air, easily drowning out the scuffle behind them and shaking the very walls from the volume.

"Master Saotome! There you are!"

Ranma looked up, and his eyebrows rose as Kaze trudged down the hall, his body weighed down considerably by several large burlap sacks full of gold and gems and tied together by a rope that hung over his shoulders.

"Ah, this is very fortunate! When we lost contact, I feared the worst!" The white priest said, wiping some sweat off his forehead. "However, my concern was for nothing! You have gone above and beyond the call of duty, as usual!"

Ranma brushed off the compliments, pointing to the treasure bags. "Did you seriously leave everyone else to go loot the treasure vaults all by yourself?"

"Of course not!" Kaze protested, looking affronted. "I wasn't by myself! I had a half-dozen rebels to help."

"That's... That's great," Ranma deadpanned, wincing slightly as an explosion of black lightning burst behind him close enough for the pigtailed man to feel his hair rising. "So, what now?"

Kaze nodded seriously. "The rebels are mostly taking to the tunnels right now to wait out the results of the battles outside. The entire region is a mess; most of the dragons have gone completely berserk, killing everything they can see. They don't seem too interested in hunting anyone down, though, so we've been able to keep casualties low in the villages."

Kaze then gestured to the fortress. "Even with the artillery down and the guards distracted, the fortress was far too well-defended for an actual attack, so we got a small force within the walls in order to find you and help the prisoners and slaves escape. I imagine the others have already found their way out, or otherwise perished."

It wasn't easy to take the cleric too seriously so long as he had the sacks of treasure hanging off his shoulders, but Ranma had to admit he was impressed. "Out of curiosity, what would you have done if I hadn't managed to free the dragons?"

"I would have revoked your rule preventing Shikodan from killing them," Kaze said seriously. "Unlikely to work, but it's a passable plan B, and I can always affect a retreat while he's being eaten."

Ranma sighed. "I was **this** close to really respecting you..."

_Whump!_ The holy dragon's head fell heavily onto the floor as Rayden plunged Darkrune deeper into the creature's throat, his dark, tainted blood running down the hilt of the blade and causing it to glow malevolently with its black aura.

"Suffer! Scream! BLEED!" the Dread Knight shouted as he took the hilt in both hands, and then pulled the great sword up through the holy dragon's jaw, splitting the creature apart in a wash of hot blood.

_Clang!_ Rayden stabbed his sword into the ground as he admired his handiwork, allowing the blade to feed on the recently spilt blood as he caught his breath and addressed his own wounds.

Kaze's eyebrow twitched. "You know... in many cultures, holy dragons are sacred, you know."

Rayden glanced at Kaze, and then looked back at the dragon. Then he turned toward Kaze again. "So, what, you want the body for your temple or something?"

The evon's face darkened. "We should probably just go," he mumbled.

"Which way out?" Ranma asked.

"I have a teleport spell keyed to a magic circle within one of the caves we used to stage the attack. I can take us all there right after I activate my other spell." The magi smirked. "Such poorly built magical gateways as the one Greken used are effective, but sadly unstable. It's very easy for these portals to collapse with a few carefully-placed spells. And the damage caused from detonating a hole in the fabric of reality tends to be... alarming."

Ranma nodded as Rayden sheathed his sword and stepped closer. "Do it. I've had enough of this place."

"It is as you wish," the evon said, raising his hands. "Spirits that dwell within the void between reality, meet at my beckoning and sunder this fragile materium. Deimos burst!"

* * *

Down the hall, in a room decorated liberally with the limbs and blood of grends and lizardmen, a tall, humanoid figure stared up at the crackling portal to his enslaver's homeworld.

"Heh. Why not?" Vargus asked himself, idly rubbing fingers still wet with Dashtall's blood. "There's nothing for me here except a bunch of ill-tempered lizards and very well-equipped humans. I may as well find victims in the next world."

_Crackle!_

Vargus blinked as several magical symbols unfamiliar to him appeared around the portal, and two slips of paper attached to the portal ring that he had assumed were decorative started to glow.

"Hm. That is... ominous," the venom dragon mumbled as the spell became active. Adding to his indefinite sense of unease, he detected a mass teleport on the edge of his senses.

_Bzrt! Shrap! Krrrrk!_ Sparks and ribbons of strange, coruscating light appeared all around the portal, which had started to rupture and splash like a rough patch of ocean.

"Yes. This is... definitely not good," Vargus mumbled fearfully, stepping backward as the talismans took the small, controlled hole punched into the material universe and tore it wide open.

_CRACK!! BWOOOOM!!_

* * *

_Vwom!_

Ranma trembled slightly as he, K, Rayden and Kaze all materialized within the caves just outside the valley where Dashtall had built his fortresses, emerging in a cascade of white and yellow, and heralded by blazing warpfire.

"Ugh... hate teleporting," Ranma complained, holding his stomach as he fought the urge to vomit. Either because of his lack of a magical aura or his advanced sensitivity to his own body, being magically deconstructed and then reconstructed elsewhere was always intensely uncomfortable for him.

"You made it! I can't believe it!" One of the rebels shouted, breaking away from the groups of humans that looked like they were in the middle of celebration. Many of them carried weapons, although most were obviously refugees from the nearby villages.

Kaze smirked. "Of course. You're dealing with the very highest caliber of heroes, you know. Our victory was assured the moment we stepped onto the field of battle."

"Well, I AM kind of impressed that you managed to find time to attack a castle, rig the gateway, help the slaves escape, AND loot the place," Ranma admitted. "Maybe you're learning after all."

Rayden frowned. "Hey, what about the dragons, though? After they've had enough of fighting each other, won't they hunt us down? Or raid the villages?"

"That's unlikely," said a new voice. Several of the humans stepped aside as a newcomer walked forward through the crowd, smiling benevolently. "The dragons may be violent, but they're far from bloodthirsty. For the most part, these people are very poor, and there's little among the villages that would tempt a dragon, save perhaps some livestock. Very few serpent kings would bother getting into a fight unless there was either a good reason, or some obvious benefit to themselves."

Kaze raised an eyebrow as he felt the moods in the room shift dramatically. Well, more specifically, it was just Ranma's mood.

The stranger was fairly tall, somwhere between Rayden's and Kaze's height, looked to be in his early thirties, and had features that held an unmistakable air of mature grace, not at all dissimilar from Kaze's own appearance. He had luxurious blond hair that came down to his shoulders in elegant curls, and wore robes that were colorful without being gaudy.

The man's aura was resisting any attempts at divination, oddly enough, so at that point the only other thing that Kaze was able to discern was that Ranma absolutely HATED this man.

"Saotome! By Nesker, it's been so long!" The man said pleasantly, smiling gently. "I should have known only you could have accomplished a feat like this! Bravo!"

At Ranma's harsh, icy silence, the stranger sweatdropped. "Ranma, don't you recognize me? It's your old master, Rakkyo!"

Ranma twitched. "Yeah. I do." Then he turned toward Rayden. "Ray? Kill him."

* * *

End Chapter 16


	17. Back Story and Murder

Species: Reptikan Uheeleran  
Common name: Grend  
Class: Demon  
Subspecies: Several nasty subspecies exist who have independently evolved unusual chemical sacs in the corners of their jaws. These can be compressed to release a fan of fire, venom, or occasionally less common substances such as lightning and frost, notably similar to the abilities of dragons. Other mutations exist, although the chaotic mating patterns of grends prevents subspecies from isolating themselves.  
Sentience & Intelligence: Varies from basic sentience to complex intellect. Although generally more intelligent and less thickheaded than lizardmen, grend intelligence is very similar in its blunt simplicity and dislike of abstract ideas. Grend have an unnatural disposition toward accepting the simplest, most apparent explanation at face value, and are almost incapable of deceit. Although this puts them at a considerable disadvantage when dealing with other demons, there is widespread appreciation for the creatures' reluctance to stab associates in the back.  
Physical biology: Similar to lizardmen, grends possess a generally humanoid shape, but retain numerous reptilian features, such as the long, wide jaw rimmed with sharp teeth, and the thick and protruding ridges on the head, back, and arms. The grends are notably more human-like, however, in that their bodies are shaped to stand erect, rather than the stooped posture of lizardmen. Grends are also much larger, and possess a thick, rough skin that manages to provide greater protection than lizardmen's scales. Grends possess protruding brow ridges and sunken eye sockets, and their fingers are thick, agile, and tipped with talons rather than the long, clumsy fingers of lizardmen. Finally, grends have no tails, owing to their more human-like gait.  
Mana resonance: Low. Grends have a difficult time grasping the idea of magical energy, although some of the creatures apparently perform magical rituals of a shamanic sort using energy derived from spirits or sacred objects. Investigations into this matter suggests that such grends are actually mentally scarred creatures who suffer hallucinations when around magical objects; by convincing themselves of their own power, they unconsciously sync their magical auras such that they can shape mana as normal. Effectively then, these shamans are mentally deficient demonic sages.  
Lifespan: Grends are hearty creatures with powerful bodies, and their demonic auras have a very slow rate of mutation. Grends don't often die of "old age," but they can easily live longer than three millennia, and have been known to survive in good health for ten times that long.  
Diet: Carnivorous. Grends will eat just about anything as long as it bleeds, but they have a particular liking for land mammals such as cows, boars, and reapers.  
Biological anomalies: Grend bodies share the robustness of lizardmen, and then amplify their strength to such a degree that it can only be attributed to their demonic nature. In addition to being nearly immune to natural toxins and disease, grends can heal at a rate just shy of full-blown combat regeneration. Unlike lizardmen, the grend constitution is hardy enough to take modern ballistics, and there have been a few rare reports of grends surviving tank cannons. On top of all this, the grends' cold-blooded nature doesn't seem to affect them in the same manner it does lizardmen; their bodies remain just as functional in extreme cold as extreme heat, although it's common knowledge that grends MUCH prefer extreme heat.  
Reproductive type: Sexual. Grends have an extremely businesslike approach to reproduction wherein the female - universally the caretaker of grend young - starts to seek the company of grend males once she reaches sexual maturity. Once she has a good selection of associates, the female will approach one and ask him to provide her with children, perhaps in return for some favor from her. She will mate with several males until she has four or five young, and then once these grends are old enough to leave their mother, she will once again look for convenient and able males to provide her with young. The males apparently see the creation of offspring as an annoying responsibility that females are constantly foisting on them; there seems to be few biological mechanisms incentivizing the grend male to mate.  
Social structure: Curiously, grends do not seem to gather in familial units after maturity, probably owing to their breeding patterns; to a grend a blood relative is nothing but another associate. Grends enjoy the company of other grends, lizardmen, and naga, and view most non-reptilians with suspicion. They're particularly distrustful of elves and intelligent demons, who are constantly taking advantage of the grends' blunt and honest nature. That said, they are not entirely insular, and if not the strongest species in a given area, they will happily assimilate into nearly any society that gives them work and food. When grends band together, they are typically very militaristic, but also very efficient, usually conquering areas that can provide them with food and supplies that they need. When this happens, grends that were performing these tasks gladly throw down their tools and take up weapons as they're swiftly replaced by fresh slaves and brutalized peasants.  
Combat analysis: Medium. Grends have the resilience to survive direct gunfire and keep fighting, though thankfully not for long. More to the point, more and more of the creatures are discovering a fondness for modern weaponry, typically heavy machine guns and rocket launchers. Given the grend's size, it can holster, draw, and fire these weapons like a sub machine gun, although the creatures often have to rely on the considerable rate of fire/blast radius to compensate for their poor aim. The only drawback that the creatures have found is that they have significant difficulty cleaning and otherwise maintaining these guns; a problem compounded by the fact that making slaves do it for them sometimes ends very badly.  
Misc. notes: Although many scholars have dismissed the feasibility of trying to make sense of demonic evolutionary patterns, it seems obvious that the grends share an ancestry of some sort with the lizardmen. Although many have surmised that the creatures get along because they have similar intellectual tendencies - both species are pretty stupid - this doesn't account for the fact that grends absolutely refuse to enslave lizardman tribes, even when it is feasible and highly advantageous to do so. Given the grends' complete physical superiority, they could easily force the lizardmen into slavery rather than hire tribes for their services. It's true that the current paid arrangement works perfectly and is certainly more fair, but the grends are as quick as any other species to capture and enslave weaker creatures, including other species of reptilians. Based on our observations, grend communities seem to be built around the services of the lizardmen as much as the leadership of the grends, and while the smaller creatures always occupy the lower social strata, they always seem to have their place among the demons. This topic deserves further study, if it ever happens that our anthropologists are allowed access to grend communities here on Earth.

US Research Division Omega - Survey File D1901

Nexus II  
by Black Dragon (black_)  
.com/anime5/faniclair

I'm a DungeonMaster now! It's cool! I'm gonna start some wars and epic power struggles!  
In other news, my Nerd Quotient has just jumped twenty points.

Chapter 17  
Back Story and Murder  
**********************************************************************************

"Well, you heard the boss," Rayden said conversationally, approaching Rakkyo while shrugging.

The blond man sighed while shaking his head. "Be serious now. I-GLURK!"

Rakkyo was cut off as Rayden seized him by the throat, eagerly pushing the man back to the edge of the cave and then slamming him into the wall.

_Crack!_ Rakkyo's eyes bugged out as the rock behind him split apart, and he started coughing painfully.

"H-Hey... wait..."

Most of the civilians and rebels in the cave simply stared at the scene in horror and confusion, most of them reasonably sure that the blond man hadn't done anything to warrant his execution, but none knowing him well enough to say for sure and interfere.

"Wait! Stop!" The crowd parted as a girl of about six or seventeen years rushed to the fore, her face pale as she saw Rakkyo being held against the wall. "Let Rakkyo go, please!

Ranma's eyes narrowed as he stared at the new arrival, which only served to make K and Kaze more confused. "Stop? Why?"

"Don't hurt him!" The girl shouted pleadingly, her eyes tearing. "Please! I love him!"

A vein popped up on Ranma's head.

"Rayden, don't," the pigtailed man said, seeing that Rayden's hand was going for his sword.

The girl let out a relieved breath, her lips cracking into a smile.

"Kill him SLOWLY," Ranma said mercilessly, his hand gripping into a fist.

Everyone in the room save Rayden gaped at this command, and K fell straight off of Ranma's shoulder, landing on the ground in a stunned heap.

"Gotcha," Rayden said indifferently, slowly putting more pressure on Rakkyo's throat as the man started to struggle.

"All right, all right, what's going on here?"

Ranma blinked in surprise at hearing a familiar voice, and brightened considerably when he saw the chef from the slave kitchens moving to the front of the crowd of refugees. "Hey, it's you! You got out okay!"

"Aye, I did. As did most of the fortress staff, near as I can tell." The gruff man crossed his arms over his shoulders. "But what's this all about, then?"

"It's a long story," Ranma said negligently, shrugging. "Just feel reassured that he deserves what he's getting."

"No," the man said firmly, glaring down at him. "Let the sap go."

Ranma looked annoyed as he gestured to Rakkyo. "Aw, c'mon! The jerk's a freaking dragon!"

A multitude of gasps rose from the crowd, and several people backed away from the confrontation taking place.

"Wait, I'm throttling a dragon?" Rayden asked, looking completely surprised by the revelation. "AWESOME."

"I know what he is! I don't care!" The girl from before protested. "I still love him!"

"Okay, first of all, no, you don't know what he is," Ranma snapped, glaring at the girl in a very uncharacteristic manner. "I guess you know his species, which is only the first clue to what kind of monster he is, and apparently he's been toying with you long enough that you're well on your way to figuring it out first hand, but you don't know jack."

He pointed toward Rakkyo as the blond man's cheeks began to reach a light purple tint. "This filthy, overgrown reptile is the single most disgusting, manipulative jerk you'll ever meet, and I don't intend to let him live long enough to prove me right!"

"I'm not calling you a liar," the chef said sternly, "but nonetheless, this beast helped several of the slaves escape the castle during the initial carnage. It wouldn't be fitting for me to let you kill him over a personal grudge."

Ranma was silent for several moments as Rakkyo's gasps started getting weaker.

"You go ahead and TRY to transform or pull some magic trick," Rayden said, grinning. "I'll nail you against the wall like a prize trout before you even know what hit you."

Finally, Ranma pointed toward the grief-stricken young woman. "Was she in the group of slaves that he saved?"

"Yes! Yes I was!" She cried, nodding rapidly.

"I figured as much," Ranma mumbled irritably. "Ray, let him go."

The Dread Knight frowned before releasing his grip regretfully. "You see this? This is the problem with killing people slowly. Sometimes they survive."

"R-Ranma! Please! Were you THAT upset when we parted ways?" Rakkyo gasped out as he collapsed onto his knees.

Ranma's glare hardened. "Ray?"

_Whump!_ Rakkyo squeaked a bit as the demonic swordsman kicked him in the stomach.

"Ha! This is fun! We should run into people Ranma hates more often!" Rayden cheered.

"Rakkyo! No!" The girl Rakkyo had rescued rushed over to the fallen dragon, cradling him gently.

Ranma looked absolutely disgusted at the sight. "Well, all right then. Good game, everybody. Let's pack it up and move along."

"You're leaving already?" the chef asked, his expression softer now that Rakkyo wasn't being actively killed. "There's still a lot of work to be done, lad."

"Yeah, I know, but we kind of just unseated an emperor, wiped out a kingdom, and sent an entire army into a berserk rampage," Ranma reasoned, rubbing the back of his head. "We're not really into nation building, you know?"

"So we heading out?" Rayden, who was the only one not struck speechless by Ranma's short bout of cold, murderous fury, jabbed a thumb down the cave. "Our bikes are that way, I think. We can be outta here in an hour."

"Cool. Let's go," Ranma said simply, gesturing sharply to Kaze and K as he moved to follow the Dread Knight.

Kaze and K shared a nervous glance before the former picked up the latter and followed their companions. Everyone else in the tunnel, most of whom had no idea who the four individuals were but well aware of how well they were armed, quickly moved to give way, letting the party deeper into the cavern.

"Wait, wait!" Rakkyo said, glowing slightly as he stood up. "Don't leave! Ranma, at least hear me out!"

Ranma didn't stop. "No. You already used up your good karma for today, jackass; the next time I run into you, it's gonna take more than a couple rescued hostages to keep you alive."

That proclamation had the effect of moving the scattered civilians out of their way even faster, and before long Ranma's party was in the deeper parts of the cavern and away from the main body of rebels and rescued villagers. There were a few people in these smaller tunnels, but most of them were eating, sleeping, or completely absorbed in some other task that needed doing while all hell was breaking loose outside.

"So... I'm somewhat concerned about that little episode back there," Kaze said timidly. "Not to judge you, of course, but he didn't seem very... what's the term... 'guilty of a capital offense'?"

"Not that I really care, but I was sort of curious," Rayden asked, turning toward the smaller man. "What did that guy do to you, anyway?"

"Remember how I said I hate dragons?" the pigtailed man snapped.

The others nodded.

"That guy was my old martial arts master," Ranma growled. He didn't really want to talk about this subject at all, but recognized that after such an uncharacteristic burst of vengeful hatred, he probably owed his companions an explanation.

K raised a metal eyebrow. "That dragon's a martial arts master?"

"No, he's not."

"Ohhhh..." K, Kaze, and Rayden all said simultaneously.

"He's a selfish bastard who'll TELL someone he's a martial arts master in order to get them to perform months and months of hard labor as 'training'," Ranma clarified.

"My, that does sound unpleasant," Kaze mumbled. "But is it really that bad? He's the one who taught you that 'dragon's flame' school, is he not?"

"That's a gray area," Ranma admitted. "In order to rope me into his stupid training, he showed off a lot of stuff that he **claimed** were martial arts techniques, but were actually just flashy versions of his ordinary dragon powers. Those are the techniques I use."

"Wait, wait, I'm confused," Kaze said, scratching his head. "So the techniques you use, you learned from him, but what he taught weren't actually techniques?"

"That's about it, yeah," Ranma said. "Everything he ever told me was a lie to sucker me into working for him. But I fell for it, and through all the abuse I actually DID improve a lot, just because I thought that it was all real training. Eventually I even managed to master the techniques he showed me, not because he taught me anything useful, but just because I kept working on it and experimenting until I could finally manage to do the same thing he could, only without the benefit of being a beast of ungodly power already."

"So... the fire aura-" K begin, only to be cut off.

"Was developed as a survival technique to work around the bastard's ovens and furnaces," Ranma growled. "He'd tell me to keep them going all day and work in a barely ventilated room while he entertained and took long baths with local women."

"Eh, that's not so harsh," Rayden said, shrugging. "I've been through worse training than that."

"Sure, it's not so bad... if it's, you know, actual TRAINING," Ranma growled out, his voice taking on a rather manic edge. "I could've gone through all that easily for the sake of power. Hell, I DID. The problem is that it was all a bunch of lies. All of it! The filthy lizard makes a habit of taking in orphans and destitute people, telling them that he'll train them or teach them in exchange for work! And then he keeps them working and working, taking all the benefit for himself, until finally the students either leave or push themselves too hard and cripple themselves... or die, in some cases. I know there's no way a human could survive working the furnaces repeatedly without some sort of defense."

Kaze frowned. "How does he keep up the charade if he doesn't have a single apparent success?"

"Well, actually, he DOES have an apparent success now," Ranma deadpanned, "but to answer your real question, Rakkyo makes sure to keep his species a secret around the humans where he lived, and passed himself off as a master wizard, warrior, archer, monk, or whatever he needed to do in order to impress people."

Ranma sneered. "He's an aura dragon, so he can pull off lots of quick, fancy stuff like phasing through objects or making himself bulletproof for a few seconds, but he's not real powerful in an actual fight. And, of course, he can't teach any of his tricks to anybody any more than I can teach K how to have opposable thumbs."

"Actually, Greken **did** teach me that," K said, taking to the air and then glowing brightly as he shifted forms. After a moment, the small, metallic dragon was replaced with a small, silver-haired pre-teen in a white toga.

"Ah, fantastic!" Kaze said, admiring the transformed dragon. "It's good to see that your growth has advanced to this point!"

"Yeah, I just-"

"_AHEM!_" K was cut off by Rayden clearing his throat quite deliberately. "If you don't mind, we were kind of in the middle of talking about Ranma wanting someone dead?"

"Thanks, Ray," Ranma said, also a little miffed at having his story interrupted just because K took his analogy literally.

"As I was saying, Rakkyo spread his own rumors as to how great a teacher he was, and although I'd heard a few names, I'm pretty sure those examples were lies too. In any case, whenever a student ran out on him and he needed help or money again, he'd leave his little mansion, find some wanderer, orphan, or loser, and give an inspiring speech as to how he saw incredible potential in them, more than he'd ever seen in anyone, and how he would forge them into a great hero, blah blah blah."

"Ah, I see. And then, to everyone's surprise, he actually managed the deed," Kaze concluded.

"Yeah, he did. Not that it was any thanks to him."

Then Ranma's face twisted into an especially hateful scowl. "But you know what? I could have lived with all that. I woulda let bygone be bygones and left the jerk with a couple lumps on his head. I mean, even if he was just manipulating me, I managed to turn his lies into an actual style, working out the ki manipulation tricks in order to survive the heat and hauling ever-increasing loads of supplies around. In the end, I improved a lot, and that was all that really mattered to me, whether my master was a monk or a con man."

He shook his head. "But no. You know why I ended up leaving that place? Rakkyo tried to kill me. REPEATEDLY. First he locked the door to the furnaces so that I couldn't get out when the day was over. When I got out of that, he made one of the furnaces explode the next day. After that he finally figured out that heat-based 'accidents' wouldn't work, so he cast a little spell to weaken me while I was hauling up materials. Next he caused a cave-in while I was working in the tunnels he was making me dig. Meals started getting bigger, which came as a nice surprise until I figured out that they were loaded with poison. There were traps set up, more attempts to kill me with magic, the occasional attack in my sleep..."

Rayden frowned. "Okay, yeah, that's a **little** worse than my training regimen."

"Every time I'd confront him about the attacks, he'd either shrug it off as training or fake innocence when he could. But finally, the old newt finally got sick of my refusal to lay down and die and challenged me for real."

The pigtailed man crossed his arms over his chest. "Well, maybe 'challenged' is a bit generous. He led me out into the forest and then went dragon on me, intent on killing me then and there. At the time, I didn't know what was going on, so I ended up running away rather than fightin' him." He gently coughed into his fist as he continued. "I mean, I could've beaten him if I'd really wanted to, but I had no idea he was a dragon until that point, and I was a little exhausted from not eating and barely sleeping, you know? I just didn't feel like it."

"Yeah, okay, we get it," K drawled. "But I'm pretty sure the question we're all wondering is: why did Rakkyo want to kill you?"

"Girls," Ranma spat the word out like a wad of poison. "That asshole wanted me dead because he was jealous."

"What? He was a dragon, wasn't he?" Rayden asked, scratching his head.

"Yeah, well, as you may have noticed, some of them don't mind human chicks," Ranma said drolly, jabbing a thumb at K, who merely shrugged. "Rakkyo, frankly, loved 'em. Constantly. Until they got sick of him or found him chasing another girl and finally left him. With him playing the 'wise, powerful hero' schtick, and probably using some magic on them too - wouldn't put anything past him - he had plenty of women. Perverted freak."

After mumbling a few more insults for good measure, Ranma got back to the story. "Well, occasionally they'd run into me, the teenage kid doin' all the work for the sake of the Art, and a few of 'em apparently decided that they liked me more than the old bastard. Of course, I was always too busy every waking moment to bother with women, and Rakkyo was pretty good about steering 'em clear of me when they lingered in the wrong places."

Finally, Ranma sighed, his enraged expression cooling rapidly toward depression. "Then there was this one girl, Tamara if I remember right, that actually came after I'd finished for the day and was heading to sleep. We were talking for a while, and I guess I started opening up a lot more than I'd intended; I'd been pretty much starved of any decent human contact for months at that point, so I was desperate for someone to talk to, and..." he cleared his throat meaningfully. "Well, one thing led to another, and I ended up getting even less sleep than usual that night."

K and Kaze each gave the pigtailed man a wordless but encouraging thumbs-up.

"The old lizard was REALLY pissed off about it, apparently, though he couldn't complain about it directly; especially seeing as he'd spent the night with another chick he'd brought along at the same time. Besides the pointless jealousy, I guess he was also ticked off that I'd proven damn near indestructible so far. I'd actually put up with his work for so long and 'figured out' his techniques such that I was starting to stand up to him and demand some real training and instruction. Because he's an idiot, he decided the easiest solution was to just kill me off."

This elicited a snort from his companions; killing Ranma was a feat that eluded war dragons and demon lords in its difficulty. Rakkyo, on the other hand, could have gotten rid of the boy quickly and not-too-painfully just by telling the truth.

"After he attacked me in the forest it took me a while to puzzle everything out and realize that I'd been duped since day one. After I recovered my strength, I seriously debated going back and wiping out the damn lizard, and maybe leveling his house too, but before I could gather the supplies a mercenary company recruited me for a big hunt up north." Ranma shook his head. "So in the end, I settled for not having to ever see the bastard again rather than getting to see his head mounted on a wall. I hadn't heard from him again until today."

"And then, with vengeance finally within your grasp, victory was pried from your bloody fingers by the pathetic sobbing of a stupid girl," Rayden said morosely, his expression grave. "Your story just gets more and more tragic."

"Yeah, well here's the happy ending: we're getting out of this pit of violent monsters and getting back on the road," Ranma said, his expression lightening as he saw the hover bikes sitting at the end of the tunnel. They were tied to bolts on the wall and had been parked next to several horses and a saurus that had apparently been trained to allow human riders. "Take one long, final look at what's left of Greken's kingdom, guys! You'll probably never see it again!"

Looking out of the tunnel, Kaze squinted to try to see through the columns of smoke, and he frowned as he saw an enormous red dragon swoop down and blast a long swath of the ground with its fire breath.

"You know, sometimes I envy you, Shikodan," the evon said. "Looking down upon something like this, it's rather hard to feel proud of what we've done here. This anarchic chaos is hardly much better than Greken's dominion."

"Feh. Regrets are for weak-minded fools," the demon knight said, grinning at the sight of the carnage. "But besides that, looking at the ashes of a battlefield and wondering about how it could have gone better is a victor's privilege. Enjoy it, priest."

Kaze snorted lightly, his mouth curling into a small smile. "Leave it to the mass murderer to find comforting words and convenient philosophies in a bloodbath," he said before turning around.

"Hey, hey, I prefer the term 'warrior' to mass murderer," Rayden complained as he followed the priest back into the cavern.

"You're not fooling anybody," Ranma said, smirking while K mounted his hover bike behind him, still in human form. "Now let's get outta here! If I never see another stupid dragon again, it'll be too soon!"

"_Ah-HEM!_" K practically shouted, looking quite put out.

"Oh, hush."

* * *

"Tsk! How tiresome," Doppler mumbled to himself as he stared bemusedly at a small, uneven crystal dangling in the air in front of him. "Another librarium cortex in a language I can't crack. Worthless."

With a gesture of his hand, the jewel flew across the room before bouncing harshly off of a wall and landing in a small bin that was already mostly full of such artifacts.

"Countless millennia of history and knowledge in the palm of my hand, and yet entirely out of reach," the demon mage complained to himself. "It figures that the ancients wouldn't use one universal language. Oh no, we wouldn't want to make this EASY for anyone. Bah."

The demon mage stewed silently by himself for a full minute before one of his arms rose to massage his chin.

"Artifacts aside, the real mystery is still that weird magi we found entombed within the vault," Doppler said. "Definitely some manner of immortal... but then, I'm making unfounded assumptions again. It could just as easily be a construct of ancient magic, or a being gifted with some sort of improved regeneration."

He grew more interested as he mused aloud before sighing and hanging his head. "But it's all for naught if I can't study the bloke. And it's a rather important policy of mine not to capture and hold specimens that I can't kill or control. A pity."

A light flared in his palms as he turned toward a computer console in the corner of his study. "Let's see... what else is on my agenda this week?"

After a few seconds he was scrolling through the files, each one carefully organized in order of progress as it rolled into view for the demon lord's perusal.

"Unit 771 is ready for training, good..."

"Genom has returned from her survey work and is studying the results..."

"Demetrius is getting restless again..."

"Shikodan is still playing around in the eastern wastes..."

The last item gave Doppler pause, as he remembered that it was related to a project much further down on his priority list: the Saotome fellow that had swiped Greken's magic glove. He had only the vaguest idea of what the Dread Knight was doing being led around by a random human adventurer, but then the dark paladin had always been characterized more by his lapses in logic than by his sense or pride.

This was, in turn, related to the Vault and his findings there, supposedly. The glove that Saotome wore that was more or less the cause of such outrage with the dragon keeper was supposed to be an artifact recovered from the Vault and smuggled away from the primary research shipments, no doubt at extraordinary expense on Greken's part.

'Actually, now that I think about it... the gauntlet was almost identical to... Kais! That mage's left hand!' Doppler's brow furrowed as he thought further on it. 'The mage Kais said something about pieces of himself missing... entire limbs, apparently. If the gauntlet still preserved in the Vault was his left hand, then it makes sense that Saotome currently possesses his right.'

One of Doppler's hands began to stroke his chin. "But what does that mean? What is the purpose of the gauntlet? And what other pieces are out there?"

Doppler's musings rapidly snowballed into possible theories, but within seconds he was frustrated by his utter lack of data.

'Taking what few educated assumptions I have as facts, all I know is that Saotome possesses an item previously possessed by a nigh-indestructible magi who dearly wants it back. Useless.' The demon mage smirked. 'Well, if I lack data, then there's only one thing to do: experiment.'

Reaching one of his four hands past his computer, he hit a button on a transmitter near the back of his desk.

"Tio, can you check if Demetrius is available? I think I finally found him a target to savage..."

* * *

The next day saw K and Kaze sitting around a campfire alongside a dirt road, the former in his human form and prodding the hoverbikes, and the latter rummaging through a large sack of gold and jewels that had been liberated from Greken's palace.

The hoverbikes laid at the side of the camp, one of them still laden with treasures looted from the fallen fortress. The other contained the party's food supplies which, to Kaze's discomfort, had been quickly and steadily shrinking as they hadn't managed to restock on their way out of Greken's former kingdom.

"Really, Master Saotome and Shikodan are the survivalists; they should be working on replenishing our supplies, not exhausting themselves to help deplete them quicker," Kaze grumbled as he finished making a neat wall comprised of a dozen stacks of gold coins. "Of course, we could easily supply ourselves if there was anything akin to civilization out here. Why are there so few settlements in Mongolia?"

"I hear there used to be a lot," K mumbled around a mouthful of dagger, having found one of the weapon caches on Ranma's bike. "Ranma says the lucky towns and cities were ransacked and reduced to ruins. The unlucky ones were completely leveled. You can tell because in those places there's still metal pipes and rebar sticking up from the wasteland."

The priest raised an eyebrow as he started on the next stack of coins. "Are there really such signs left over?"

"There were before I got there," K said, snapping up the hilt of the dagger and chewing happily. "Properly aged rebar is an acquired taste, but it grows on you."

"I doubt that," Kaze said dryly as he dumped out several jewels onto the ground. "Aren't those two finished yet? They've been gone a few hours now."

"Dunno. Ranma said they were gonna get some serious training done, so they might not be finished until night. Something about a new technique he wanted to try out."

Kaze nodded. "I suppose it can't be helped, then. The breadth of Master Saotome's arsenal is his greatest advantage, so learning anything new is a good idea."

* * *

"This is a really stupid idea," Rayden deadpanned.

Looking over his training apparatus, Ranma had a hard time disagreeing. He was currently suspended about three meters off the ground by a rope tied around his waist and one arm, and his other arm, while free, had his hand bandaged to the point that only his index finger was sticking out.

Across a small gap between the trees hung a boulder roughly twice his size, also suspended by rope to one of the sturdier trees. Rayden was standing behind the boulder in preparation to throw it forward, but the demonic knight seemed extremely skeptical of the entire exercise.

"Look, I didn't design the training regimen, okay? This is how it's done," Ranma snapped, focusing his will on the boulder. 'See the structure within the structure... the breaking point must be there somewhere!'

"Back in the citadel, sometimes the Dread Knight captains would pick out some of the most ambitious berserkers and neophytes and then give them stupid, self-destructive training projects, like cleaning their skin with scalding steam, ingesting poison with meals, and keeping their sleeping quarters at sub-zero temperatures."

"As expected of a demon temple; the training sounds pretty hardcore," Ranma mumbled as he kept concentrating.

"That wasn't training, it was hazing. Most of those recruits died from it and most of the rest were too crippled to fight. And then they died too. Cripples don't last long in a warrior temple."

Ranma glanced down at his demonic companion. "But the rest of them overcame the hardships and became the best of the best, right?"

"No, they went into battle without any useful skills or techniques and THEN died. Well, except for me," Rayden admitted.

"You went through a lot of hazing as a trainee?" Ranma asked, shifting in his harness. "Hard to picture you being bullied."

"Yeah, well it's hard to picture YOU shattering rocks with your finger," the Dread Knight countered. "Do you even know that this thing works?"

"Look, would you stop arguing with me and just swing the boulder? I think I'm ready to do this."

Rayden rolled his eyes and raised a hand up to the bottom of the massive rock before shoving it back as if he was tossing it over his shoulder. "All right, but don't complain to me when you get smash-"

_Wham!_

Ranma winced, not from the rock impacting him, but rather from it slamming into the back of Rayden's head and sending the dark paladin sprawling onto the ground. "Ray, if you want to join in too then you should at least face the right way. You're never going to learn the breaking point like that."

"Ha ha," the larger man groused as he pushed himself up off the ground. "Here. Your turn!" With an irritated grunt, Rayden shoved the boulder forward, straight toward Ranma.

The pigtailed man promptly flipped about in the air to catch the swinging rock against his feet, and then grit his teeth as he was pushed backward through the air. "There!"

Rayden frowned as he watched Ranma dig his free finger into the surface of the rock, and this time the demon knight made sure to step out of the way as the boulder swung back toward him. "Fail."

"Tch! I guess it was too much to hope that I'd get it on first try," Ranma mused as he swung back and forth behind the rock, their motions now synced.

"That aside, are you sure you're supposed to brace yourself like that to avoid an impact?" Rayden asked, crossing his arms. "It just seems to me that this exercise goes through an awful lot of trouble to restrict your movements... almost seems like cheating."

"Cheating? What?" Ranma asked, looking offended by the statement. "If I didn't do that, then I'd get smashed in the face every time I failed. If I didn't manage to perfect it quickly, then I'd be crushed to a pulp before long. What kind of stupid training exercise is that?"

"Despite a nagging feeling that I'm missing something here, your logic is sound," Rayden admitted as he stopped the boulder. "Ready for another go?"

"Yeah..." Ranma waited until Rayden had tossed the boulder back away from them, and then he gasped. "Wait! I've got it!"

Rayden immediately turned around. "Eh? Got wha-" _Wham!_

Ranma snickered as the Dread Knight skidded across the dirt. "You know, you could treat this as a training exercise too. You should learn to be more aware of your surroundings."

"Yeah, yeah, laugh it up," Rayden growled as he got back to his feet.

"Actually, I'm serious," Ranma continued, spinning about lazily in the air as he spoke. "For example, I notice that every time the boulder hits you in the head, despite being in full swing at the time, it almost stops dead on impact. Knowing that your skull can absorb that level of force and shrug it off in a few seconds would be really important in a fight."

"Eh? Why would we be fighting?" Rayden asked, scratching his skull where the rock had impacted.

"It's just an example," Ranma said, shrugging. "You're the type that rushes into battle without a clue, and half the time being nigh indestructible just isn't enough if you can't even judge your opponent that much."

Rayden frowned and started rubbing his chin.

"But hey, enough of that. This is my training exercise!" Ranma said suddenly, stopping his slow spinning motion and steeling himself. "Lemme have it!"

"Alright, then!" Rayden said, pushing the rock back and turning out of the way as it swung back a moment later.

'See it with your mind's eye,' Ranma thought to himself as time seemed to slow down, the boulder looming larger in his vision. 'Like the aura sight, that can sense death a moment before a bullet strikes or an invisible blade falls, look for the seam in the rock's existence, and focus your energy onto that point!'

"Found it!" Ranma shouted as he once again braced himself against the rock with his feet, letting the boulder carry him up into the air as his bare finger flared a furious red. "HYAH!"

Almost immediately, the entire rock shook violently as it was encompassed with flames, and dark red seams flooded through the boulder as the ropes holding it suspended vanished into a cloud of ash.

_Bwoom!_ After a brief moment, a relatively small explosion from around Ranma's hand propelled the boulder forward, flames trailing it like a comet as it blasted across the training grounds.

"Why?" Rayden managed to mumble before the flaming projectile slammed into him, exploding in a burst of fire and hot shrapnel.

Ranma was silent as he swung back and forth in the air, frowning as he stared at the burning ropes that used to hold the boulder and the fiery crater that currently held his training partner.

"Huh. That wasn't supposed to happen," Ranma admitted awkwardly.

"Gugh..." the smoking core of the boulder, still mostly intact after the explosion, shifted as Rayden shoved it aside, freeing his legs and allowing him to crawl out of the shallow flames. "Ow... burns... combined with... internal bleeding... hurts... hurts a lot..."

"Oi, are you okay? It looks like you took that boulder right in the chest," Ranma asked. "Also... you know... with the fire and everything..."

Rayden spent a moment panting as he collapsed outside the impact zone, and then stood up shakily before looking down at his burnt and tattered coat. "You know, I really have to invest in a fire-proof trench coat. Maybe something enchanted. I'm running through these things way too fast."

"Well, if you're not injured, can you find another boulder? I don't think that one's good anymore," Ranma requested as he swayed back and forth in the air.

"You wanna keep going?" Rayden asked as he cracked one of his shoulders back into place. "Didn't you just master the technique?"

"No, that was the wrong thing. It didn't split the entire boulder, it just lit it on fire and sent it flying," Ranma explained.

"That seems like a much better technique than the other thing," offered the Dread Knight. "Why don't you just use that?"

"BECAUSE, idiot, if I come up against something like a stone golem, all that technique is going to do is set one of its limbs aflame. This technique is for destroying walls and boulders, not hurling them at people like meteors."

Rayden looked unconvinced. "That still sounds like a step down to me."

"And that's why 'thinking' isn't among the tasks I ever ask you to do," Ranma noted. "Now shut up and do what I say."

"You got it, boss."

* * *

"By Thajal's unshaven hippie beard, what happened to you?" Kaze asked in alarm as Ranma and Rayden trudged back to camp.

Although both of the fighters were arriving, it was quite obvious that the question was being directed at Rayden, as the dark paladin was dirty, burnt, severely bruised, and had several patches of dried blood around his face and chest.

"It was just some training," Ranma answered as if nothing was wrong, turning to rummage through the luggage attached to his hoverbike. "I learned a new technique! Well, two techniques, actually."

"Did Rayden learn anything?" K asked morbidly as he stared at the mutilated demon.

"I learned that after the third exploding boulder impact, the world goes fuzzy and I can no longer feel pain," Rayden said in a monotone before collapsing into a sitting position.

"That's pretty hardcore," K mused.

"Yes... there were many hard cores," the Dread Knight mumbled. "Some of them actually burned hotter than the flying shrapnel bits." Kaze promptly sat down next to him and started his healing spells, sighing wearily at the extent of the damage.

Ranma chugged the contents of a water skin before he placed the empty vessel back into the hoverbike's side compartment. "All right, everybody get a good rest. Tomorrow we're making the long haul toward the capital."

"What's at the capital?" K asked curiously.

"Hopefully the last scraps of what used to be a real civilization. And preferably the kind of scraps that are doing well enough to find gold more valuable than food," the pigtailed man admitted. "I've never been around these parts before, but the old capitals tend to be the first places that people build up into settlements, so we're going to go check it out."

"Sounds like a plan," Rayden said, sounding noticeably more lucid. "OW! Hey, could you heal the internal damage BEFORE you heal the nerve endings?"

"What do you know about healing magic?" Kaze snapped, tactfully avoiding the question. "Just be glad there's someone proficient in our group."

"True, if it weren't for you this would take all night to heal," Rayden admitted, causing the others to give him annoyed stares.

"Well, just make sure you're in fighting shape for-" Ranma suddenly stopped his lecture as his eyes widened, and he suddenly whirled around.

K blinked as an image flickered into being in front of Ranma, smiling amiably at them as it opened its mouth to speak. "Hey it's that Rakkyo gu-"

_Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Click! Click!_

Ranma's eye twitched as he continued pulling the trigger on his nighthawk pistol, growling as if its depleted ammunition were a nasty twist of fate rather than an expected result of him shooting as fast as he could into Rakkyo's head.

"I expected that reaction," Rakkyo sighed, his face noticeably free of bullet holes. "As you may have figured out by now, this is an illusion spell used to communicate with others over a distance; my body is nowhere nearby."

"I see," Ranma mumbled, frowning as he lowered the gun. "Ray, Koz, do either of you know any ways to kill someone through an illusion spell?"

"That is patently ridiculous," Kaze said bluntly.

"Believe me, I've tried," Rayden offered.

Ranma grumbled incoherently for a few moments, and then gestured sharply with his hand. Kaze and Rayden glanced at each other and then walked off, leaving K and Ranma alone with the illusory image.

"Are you feeling a bit less homicidal now?" Rakkyo asked as he ran a hand through his blond hair.

"No, but I've accepted that I can't hurt you right now, so let's do this; how can I get you to leave me alone forever?" Ranma asked, his voice icy.

Rakkyo shook his head. "I see you still hold to the grudge you bore against me since your training. Ranma, what happened was a misunderstanding-"

"Yeah, you 'misunderstood' me to be a pushover," Ranma growled. "Don't try and pass off your trying to murder me as some kind of accident!"

"You were young and impatient at the time, so it's not unusual that you didn't understand," Rakkyo offered. "I had intended to get right to the business at hand, but this is a rare opportunity to make amends. You don't understand what happened at the end of your training."

"My teacher turned into a dragon, tried to fry me with an aura beam, and then pinned me down under his claws while he tore up my soul. It's not that hard to get," Ranma said.

Rakkyo shook his head. "That was to be your final test, the last training exercise before you were granted full mastery of the school of the dragon's flame. Instead, in your confusion, you fled before I could finish modifying your aura. It was my fault, I suppose. Throughout all your training, I never bothered to explain much beforehand."

Ranma grit his teeth. "Cut out the bullshit, old man! There IS no school of the dragon's flame beyond what I've managed to do on my own!"

"Hmph!" the illusion snorted before Rakkyo's eyes narrowed. "Tell me Ranma, do you really think the human body is that resilient? That you can gain the heat resistance of a salamander simply by working around ovens for days at a time? Do you think so much of yourself that all you need to accomplish the impossible is to make the impossible necessary?"

Ranma scratched his head. "Well, that's pretty much how things've worked so far..."

"Your arrogance is to be expected. And again, I bear some responsibility for giving you no reason to trust me," Rakkyo said sadly. "It was necessary, however. Had you thought that such improvement were the result of a few aura manipulations rather than the fruits of your own efforts and endurance, you wouldn't have driven yourself nearly as hard as you did and might have come to rely on me."

"Wait, whoa, hold on," Ranma said, scrubbing his hair with his hand. "Are you saying that the dragon's flame aura is from your work, and not mine?" He seemed quite offended by the suggestion, and understandably so.

"Hardly, but without my aura treatments, administered at night while you slept deeply in the throes of exhaustion, there's no possible way you would have adapted so quickly or completely to your training conditions."

Before Ranma could offer a retort, K cut in. "That sounds about right to me. Humans can't just align their bodies' energies to withstand extreme heat. But aura magic can probably change your elemental affinity to do so."

"Hey! Why're you on his side?" Ranma demanded, turning on the silver-haired boy.

K flinched and held up his hands. "Whoa, whoa! I'm not taking sides, here! I'm an impartial observer to these circumstances!" Coughing into a fist, he continued. "All I'm saying is that his story sounds plausible. I'm pretty sure aura dragons can do that, and it's a better explanation for your fire affinity than just suffering around the furnaces."

"He's a selfish, manipulative liar!" Ranma growled.

"I'm not saying you're wrong, but do you have any proof that he's lied to you? When you say that all his training was just a scam, are you saying that because of what you went through yourself, which he just explained, or was this something you heard all around the town?" K asked.

Ranma grit his teeth and turned back toward the illusion. "Assuming all that crap you just fed me is true, what about all the times you tried to kill me during training? What about being locked in the furnace room?"

"It was necessary to maximize your heat resistance. Just spending several hours at a time would have only led to a partial adaptation," Rakkyo explained.

"And the sudden cave-ins and weakening spells?"

"Heavy lifting on its own is hardly any sort of training for someone of your caliber. Adding obstacles to an otherwise mundane exercise improves the results."

"And what about the poison?"

"Poison? Oh, your food! That wasn't poison at all; they were unique medicines that induce an improved regenerative state in the body! They were intended to help increase the pace of your training. I can only offer my apologies for the horrible taste."

Ranma clenched his teeth as Rakkyo stared down at him, his expression perfectly calm. "There's no way... this is all just a little too convenient..."

"I understand your doubt, Ranma, and I can only beg your forgiveness for my mistakes. You're right in that what I put you through benefited me a great deal, and you're right in that a lesser man would have surely died under the conditions I imposed upon you."

"Was he right about the sleeping around?" K asked suddenly.

"Oh, was he ever!" Rakkyo agreed, nodding rapidly. "But I did all of it - except the sleeping around part - to make you into the greatest warrior possible, Ranma. I wanted you to succeed where so many others had failed... and even considering how things turned out that day in the forest, looking at you now..." Ranma flinched as a lone tear actually crawled down the illusory Rakkyo's cheek. "I feel no sorrow, no regret, no frustration... only pride."

There was a long silence as Ranma stared at Rakkyo's wistful expression, and then finally, after almost twenty seconds, the pigtailed man tossed the nighthawk aside.

"All right, old man. I don't know if I believe your story, but I'll admit that maybe, MAYBE, you weren't as big a slime ball as I thought," Ranma muttered. "So for old time's sake, I'll hear you out. Just this once."

Rakkyo immediately clapped his hands together, obviously delighted. "Oh, thank you! I knew you'd listen to reason! This really is very important!"

"Yeah, speaking of which, shouldn't Rayden and Kaze be here for this?" K asked, glancing around the camp site. "Where'd they go?"

As if in answer to his question, Rayden's form suddenly flickered into being behind Rakkyo's illusory body, a savage grin on his face.

"Huh? Where'd you come from?" K asked immediately before stopping to consider why the dark paladin's body would appear like that. "He's... not here, is he?"

Rakkyo blinked. "Not there? What do you-" the aura dragon's expression darkened as a hand fell onto his shoulder, and he slowly turned his head around to look at who was behind him.

A moment later, an illusory image of Kaze appeared next to Rakkyo, smiling as he faced Ranma and Kaze. "Master Saotome! We found him! Sorry it took so long; the counter-scry doesn't cast quickly."

"THIS time we should kill him right away, before he convinces you to let him live," Rayden said as he drew his sword from its sheathe with his free hand.

"Too late," Ranma said, shrugging.

"Damn it!" Rayden growled, tightening his grip on the aura dragon's shoulder as Kaze sighed. "Can I at least beat him up like last time?"

"Wait a minute; he's about to give us a job," Ranma insisted. "So? What is it you want us to do?"

"Well, first, I want you to call your men back to you," Rakkyo said nervously.

"No," Ranma said simply. "There's a good reason why Kaze's there. He's a psychic, so he'll be able to tell if you're lying. So he's going to stay right there while you tell us what happened and what you want us to do, and you're going to drop all your mental defenses or whatever so that he can get a clear read on you. All right?"

"But I-" the aura dragon started to protest, and then squeaked nervously as Rayden's hand started squeezing his shoulder with enough force to crush stone.

"Don't get the wrong idea, lizard," the demon knight snapped, "Ranma may not want you dead anymore, but if you want his help, you play by his rules."

'So this is what having a henchman thug is like,' Ranma mused to himself as Rakkyo's expression faltered. 'It's kinda nice. I can see why the bad guys keep them around.' "We're waiting, Rakkyo."

The aura dragon straightened and steeled his expression. "I have nothing to hide. A few weeks ago, my home was infiltrated by a demonic creature of some sort that drove me from it; I believe it was a sentient weapon, a blade or ax or something that managed to gain free will and substantial power through a combination of powerful enchantment and equally powerful short-sightedness."

"And this thing managed to throw you out on your tail?" Ranma asked, crossing his arms over his chest. "I know aura dragons aren't the beefiest lizards in the realms, but you should at least have your pride."

Rakkyo sighed. "There were... circumstances."

"It took a female form?" Kaze guessed, picking up on Rakkyo's thought patterns as he scoured the dragon's mind.

"A **sexy** female form," Rakkyo confirmed. "It tricked me in order to get into my home, and then attacked as soon as my guard was down! And then she actually SOLD me! Me! Sold me to Greken like a heifer where I've suffered under his blasted mind control!"

_Whack!_ the serpent king flinched as Rayden slammed a fist into the top of his head. "It's your own fault, idiot! Why should we clean up your mess?"

"Keep in mind that we're asking seriously, here," Kaze cut in. "We need proper incentive to take on tasks such as this."

"You don't understand!" Rakkyo groused. "This isn't just my problem! The entire town next to my lair has fallen under the sway of the demon weapon! It presents itself as a goddess, and exacts bloody retribution upon those that don't obey! This isn't about liberating my home, it's about liberating an entire settlement!"

"I'm sorry, but all I'm hearing at this point is 'if you want me to pay you, you're going to have to hit me more'!" Rayden said, raising his fist again.

"Ranma! Talk some sense into these fools!" Rakkyo cried as he covered his head pitifully.

"Rayden, hold on a sec," Ranma said, crossing his arms over his chest. "Koz, is he making this up?"

The evon shook his head. "He's being completely honest. Though I still wish to be paid."

Ranma nodded. "Rakkyo, don't get me wrong, I do wanna help. But this is mostly your home at stake, and it's your mistake that caused this. I'm sure you can come up with something to offer us."

"How about a training session?" the aura dragon asked.

Ranma's eye twitched. "Ray."

_Crack!_ "Gyeeeee!" Rakkyo cried out as the demon knight behind him dislocated his shoulder.

"Thanks Ray," Ranma said. "Okay, look. If you really can't offer us a lousy reward off the bat, we'll talk about it after the job is over. This doesn't sound too horrible, so I won't ask for anything up front."

"How noble of you," Rakkyo spat, glaring over his shoulder at Rayden.

"Don't give me that. Even if you're not the selfish, murdering bastard I thought you were, you still haven't done anything to deserve my help," Ranma snapped. "So Nantika needs to be liberated from an evil demon sword, eh? Fine. Are you gonna send us there, or do you want us to walk, too?"

"I can teleport us all to the village; I have a portal anchor set there, so we can leave immediately," Rakkyo grumbled.

"All right then..." Ranma hesitated for a moment, and then his eyes narrowed. "One last thing, Rakkyo. Say once more that the hell you put me through was for my sake. Tell me again that you never meant to kill me, and that your sick training was real."

"Yes, sure, all that," the aura dragon mumbled impatiently. At seeing Ranma's glare, he sighed. "Everything was for your own good, Ranma. The training - which was real - was to strengthen you, not kill you. This I swear on my life."

Kaze nodded with a smile. "His thoughts are pure... well, pure-ish. He's telling the truth."

"Good. As soon as Ray finishes, you guys come meet us at the camp and we'll leave immediately," Ranma said as he turned around to start packing.

Rakkyo blinked. "Finishes? Finishes with wha-" before he could even finish that sentence, the Dread Knight's knee slammed into his stomach, knocking the air out of him before Darkrune's hilt smashed into the top of his head, knocking him to the ground.

"What's the matter, dragon? Aren't you gonna fight back?" Rayden punctuated the taunt by stomping on Rakkyo's back, eliciting a pained yelp from the serpent king.

"Shikodan, make haste with your senseless bullying. We have a job to get to," Kaze admonished as he waved his staff in the air, dispelling the communication ritual.

K sweatdropped as the illusions of Rakkyo and their companions vanished, and then turned toward Ranma. "That was a little cold... didn't he prove that all the bad blood between you was a misunderstanding?"

"More or less," Ranma muttered. "But he's still an idiot, a selfish jerk, and a lecher. And what petty evils he does he almost always gets away with, so I'm sure he deserves a good beating." After he finished packing away the treasure that Kaze had been counting, he added, "Besides, I told Rayden I'd let him beat Rakkyo, remember?"

"I'm just saying, you're kind of setting a bad precedent, and you're usually pretty insistent on 'good guy' behavior..."

"Yeah, and look where that got me," Ranma deadpanned as kicked dirt over the campfire. "Look, don't worry about Rakkyo, all right? I know he's the first of your scaly brethren that we're actually going to be traveling with, but just because he passed a psychic lie detector test doesn't mean he's trustworthy."

"Really? What does, then?" K asked.

"People are redeemed through actions, not words," Ranma said sagely as he finished packing up the last of the camping gear and tying it to the hoverbikes. "Saying the right thing can buy a second chance, but it doesn't prove you're a good person." Then he snorted. "If it did, then Koz would be a saint."

K winced. "Point taken. Still, I didn't expect you to be so... philosophical about it."

"Rakkyo brings out the worst in me, it's true," Ranma mumbled, snapping on the activation key and watching as the hoverbike immediately jumped several inches and remained there.

A few minutes later the sound of dry leaves and brush being trampled alerted Ranma and K that someone was approaching, and Kaze waved happily as he stepped through the surrounding foliage. "We've returned! And we've brought along our method of transportation!"

Rayden stepped up behind the white priest and tossed Rakkyo haphazardly onto the ground. The aura dragon's face was bruised and swollen, and the rest of him was dirty besides, but all in all the blond man wasn't badly injured.

"That was cruel and unnecessary," Rakkyo complained as he shakily pushed himself up from the dirt.

"Fun, too," Rayden responded. "Now make with the magic, scumbag." Rakkyo sighed and started mumbling the appropriate words of power as his hands glowed with arcane light.

"You know Ray, you don't have to keep treating him like an enemy," Ranma said as he brought the hoverbikes closer to the rest of the group.

Rayden considered this. "Do I have to NOT keep treating him like an enemy?"

Ranma sweatdropped. "Uh... no, I guess not."

_Whack!_ Rakkyo yelped as Rayden suddenly kicked him in the leg, and the aura dragon glared behind him as the demon knight grinned.

"Keeping a rather loose leash on him this time, eh?" Kaze ventured.

Ranma rolled his eyes. "At least he's acting like this to someone I don't like. Let him vent."

Rakkyo's teeth clenched upon hearing the nearby conversation, but the aura dragon dutifully continued casting as motes of light began to appear and settle into a ring of arcane symbols on the ground. "We'll be departing in a few seconds. The teleportation can be jarring, so make sure to steady yourself."

"Thanks, Mom," Rayden snapped sarcastically as the energy around the group slowly built greater and greater.

A moment later, Kaze's head snapped up, and his eyes narrowed as he stared toward the treetops.

"Koz? What's wrong?" Ranma asked, noticing the evon's distraction.

"I'm not sure," the priest mumbled uncertainly, "I think I sense-"

And before he could complete that sentence, the group vanished in a flare of light, leaving behind only the ashen remains of their camp fire.

_THWOOOOOM!_ A second later those ashen remains were obliterated as a screaming missile of psionic energy slammed into the spent teleportation circle, consuming everything in a five-meter radius in a searing bath of pure, destructive energy.

Above the smoldering crater, a glowing figure with an aura like blue wildfire floated in the sky, his featureless face staring down at the pointless destruction.

"A moment sooner..." Demetrius Yaermon seethed as he descended to the ground, stopping once he was barely an inch above the dirt and then hovering there.

After looking around briefly, the demon lord snarled as energy burst all around him. "Damnation! I am a leader of armies and destroyer of civilizations! Why do I hunt for humans like a lowly hound?"

With no one to answer his questions, the demon lord shot up into the sky, his blood lust building as the hunt began anew. "Doppler will pay for this insult! But at least I can vent my rage on that human, first!"

* * *

"Well, here we are," Rakkyo said as the party crested a hill overlooking a small settlement below. "My home town, Nantika. Former nationality: Vietnamese, with some Chinese refugees mixed in. Population: 800-something. Major industries: fishing and coal. Notes of interest: a merfolk colony a little ways up the coast, a rather gentle and talkative old swamp troll living in the forest and, of course, an aura dragon lair on the western periphery."

"We should probably start by killing the swamp troll," Rayden said immediately as he looked over the settlement below.

"How would that help?" Ranma asked, crossing his arms over his chest.

Rayden shrugged. "Well, my first choice was killing Rakkyo, but he's paying us."

"Putting aside, for the moment, any senseless bloodshed, how are we to go about the sensible bloodshed?" Kaze asked. "This enemy turned aside a dragon. Regardless of that particular dragon's combat strength, this is not an enemy we can take too lightly."

"I don't see what the big deal is," Rayden answered. "She's a weapon, right? Sword or ax or whatever?"

Rakkyo nodded hesitantly.

"So send in K. Five minutes later the weapon's gone, K is fed, and this town is out a messiah or a prophet or whatever," the demon knight explained. K made a squeamish noise while Kaze and Rakkyo winced.

Ranma raised his eyebrow. "Huh... as plans go, that's actually not as bad as I expected from you. But no. We need to get a better read on the situation before we decide whether to kill our target and how. We also need to see exactly how fanatical her worshipers are; I'd like to avoid killing any townsfolk."

"Always trying to do things the hard way," Rayden sighed. "So what do we do, then?"

Rakkyo cleared his throat, momentarily securing everyone's attention. "Whatever your plans, I'm afraid I won't be able to accompany you into the town."

Ranma rolled his eyes. "I figured as much, but please, let's hear your excuse."

"After the demon took control of the town, I was branded a heretic and exiled from my home. If they see me, the townsfolk will attack on sight," the aura dragon sighed.

"What, with all your magic and 'aura' crap, you can't even disguise yourself from a bunch of backwater humans?" Rayden sneered.

"I could, but even then I would only be a burden to you if I couldn't even use my abilities," Rakkyo reasoned. "Not to mention the considerable chance I would be discovered regardless of a disguise. I'm fairly well-known. Especially among the women."

A vein throbbed briefly over Ranma's head, but he let the topic go. "So there's nothing you can do to help us. Fine. You go meditate on whatever reward you'll give us after we've got your home back."

"Now I didn't say I couldn't help," Rakkyo said, wagging a finger, "just that I couldn't wander about. Tell me Ranma, do you recall my study room?"

"Yeah..." the pigtailed man said suspiciously.

"Within my study, there's a pedestal that acts as a teleport gate. I can link it to any one of a number of locations around the world, some of them wonderfully isolated. If you can distract the demon so that I can approach my lair without it noticing, and then lure it onto the pedestal, then I can teleport it far, far away."

"Thus avoiding a bloody battle to the death and any local anger over the murder of their idol," Kaze said agreeably. "A fine idea."

"I guess it could work," Ranma said. "But for now, we camp out. Tomorrow it's go time."

"Roger!" his subordinates barked before scattering toward the hoverbikes to make camp a second time.

Rakkyo, meanwhile, turned away from his hired hands silently, his expression carefully muted as he wandered away into the woods beyond.

* * *

The next day saw Rayden stalking purposefully toward the town, his head held high and a fierce smile on his face.

The plan had been hashed out the previous night, and although the Dread Knight was quite disappointed that he wouldn't be doing any real fighting, his job was still somewhat enjoyable.

* * *

(The previous night, after dinner)

"Listen Ray; this isn't going to be a normal assault," Ranma explained closely as he and his fellow adventurers clustered around a dying camp fire. "We're not facing an actual army here, but a bunch of ignorant townspeople manipulated by a magical creature. And like I said, I don't want to see any of them killed."

"So what you're saying is... maiming only?" the demonic warrior asked.

Ranma rapped the larger man on the head, but quickly got back to the point. "No. What I've decided to do is avoid a mass defense of the demon by using a two-pronged assault. What I want YOU to do is go into town and cause a ruckus."

Rayden raised an eyebrow, his interest piquing. "Define 'ruckus', please."

"Just do what you do second-best after murder: piss people off. Mock their religion, kick sand in their eyes, whatever. Do everything short of hurting the townsfolk to get the entire town ready to lynch you, and that way nobody's going to pay much attention to a few outsiders infiltrating the lair of the prophet or whatever this freak is calling herself. When you've got a good mob after you, fire one of those dark fireballs into the air to signal that the coast is clear."

* * *

Rayden grinned as he passed through the gate of the palisade that protected the village from wild creatures, and he cracked his knuckles in anticipation as a young man approached him.

"Hello and welcome to Nanti-" the man started to say in English before Rayden suddenly jabbed a finger into his chest.

"YOU!" Rayden shouted. "Your goddess is a pathetic fraud, and your religion is rubbish!"

The man blinked, startled, and several people nearby suddenly stopped at the sudden shout. "Huh?"

"You heard me!" the Dread Knight snarled, looming over the shorter man. "You all must be idiots to worship a second-rate shape-shifting whore! Everything you thought you knew is a lie!"

There was absolute silence surrounding the town gates as several of the citizens glanced at each other in astonishment, broken only by a few citizens translating for others that only spoke their native languages.

"You know, the guy's got a point," an older man said suddenly, scratching his head. "I know we're only doing it to preserve peace and all, but it's a pretty stupid concept."

"Yeah, who ever heard of worshiping a sword, even if it can talk?" a girl mumbled. "I'd be better off praying to the town well. At least it's good for something."

"You know, I heard Buddhism is popular now," a guard said as he walked away from the encounter, "maybe I'll convert."

Rayden remained silent as he took in all the very reasonable replies to his angry vitriol, and then once again stared down at the young man that had greeted him. "You don't seem very offended by the truth. You must not be very religious."

"I'm not, to be honest," the greeter admitted. "But, well, do you have any alternative faiths to offer?"

"Er..." Rayden scratched the back of his head for a moment, not expecting this sort of question. "Well, I'm a part of the Dark Brotherhood of Kharak. It's not for everyone, but I like it."

"I see. It does seem rather edgy, but I have an open mind," the young Vietnamese man offered. "What sort of things does this 'Kharak' offer?"

"Mostly power," Rayden said, shrugging. "It's one of those souls-for-strength deals. You basically give up your life to become a total killing machine, and Kharak rewards the devoted by making them resistant to injury, able to conjure dark magic, inuring them against fear, and other stuff like that."

"Do you have a pamphlet or something?" a younger girl asked as she happened upon the conversation while carrying a basket full of bread. "My brother is trying to make a living as a mercenary, and he's been looking for some sort of edge to pull ahead of the competition."

"Oh, well in that case, Kharak is perfect for him!" Rayden said happily, withdrawing a thick book with the crest of the Third Brotherhood on it. He opened the tome and promptly started thumbing through it. "I don't have a pamphlet - I honestly don't do much recruiting myself - but I can offer a few key passages that might pique his interest."

"Ooh! Does Kharak have anything to offer protectors like guards, or is he more of a 'offense' war god?" the guard who was considering Buddhism asked.

"Well, generally Kharak prefers the glory-seeking, battle-crazed type, it's true, but for any aspect of warfare, there's-"

Suddenly, Rayden slammed his book closed as his eyes narrowed. "This... is not why I'm here."

"Huh? What's wrong?" the gathered civilians watched curiously as Rayden glanced around, frowning, and then turned on his heel before walking right out of the gates he had entered through.

"Was it something I said?" the guard asked as the other residents looked on in confusion. After several seconds, however, they pushed the incident from their minds and went back to their daily business.

* * *

(Two hours later)

"Hey! He's back!" one of the guards shouted out to his fellows as sighted a trench coat-clad individual stalking toward the village. "Huh. Wonder what he left for?"

"Maybe he forgot to bring some gear or something? Look, he's got a sack with him this time," the greeter pointed out as Rayden reached the gates.

The demon knight stepped through the front gate of the palisade for the second time that day, his face set in a grim frown as he hauled a large sack over his shoulder. 'Different villages need different approaches, after all. If yelling at people and shouting uncomfortable truths won't stir the hornets, I'm just not pressing the right buttons.'

"Hey there stranger!" the greeter from before said as he once again approached the Dread Knight amiably. "How are you feeling? You left in quite a hurry!"

Rayden smirked. "I feel much better, thanks! Killing something always cheers me up!"

The young man blinked, noting that, like before, the newcomer was causing people to stop in their normal routines and stop to watch. "Is that so? What is it you killed?"

"Swamp troll," Rayden said simply, reaching into his sack and pulling the boulder-sized head out by its greasy hair to show the assembled townsfolk.

_Thump!_ One woman's basket of vegetables fell to the dirt from her numb fingers, her face paling as she stared at the decapitated head.

"The hell? Grimna! You killed Grimna!" the guard shouted, his eyes wide as his hand tightened around his halberd.

"Uncle Grim! No!" a little girl shouted before she started to cry, burying her face in her father's leg.

"Wh-Why would you kill Grimna?" the greeter gasped. "He was kind, gentle and intelligent! What possible reason would you have for committing violence upon such a pure, harmless soul?"

Rayden stopped to think about the questions for a moment. "He was ugly and he smelled bad," he said finally, grinning as he tossed the head up into the air in front of him.

_Thwud!_ A meaty kick from the dark paladin sent the troll's algae-covered face flying over the village streets, spinning around in the air before finally plummeting back down toward the ground.

_Crash! Whump!_ People gasped in horror as the decapitated head landed right on top of the town's main well, smashing through the wooden roof of the structure and sticking itself into the stone ring like a cork.

"Whaddya think of that?" Rayden said jovially even as several townsfolk glared murderously at him and started reaching for weapons and farm implements. "Makes a nice centerpiece for your sleepy little village, eh? Don't worry, no charge."

"Oh, no," the greeter said through clenched teeth as the guard tossed him a short sword. "On the contrary, we're going to be paying you back **in full**."

Rayden's grin got wider as he raised a hand into the air, his palm crackling with dark lightning. 'I KNEW killing the swamp troll was the right way to start this thing! Mission accomplished!'

* * *

"Is that the signal?" Ranma asked as he saw a sphere of darkness fly up above the village and then burst into a small cloud of crackling energy. "Yeesh, took him long enough."

"I was beginning to fear that he had actually failed," Kaze mumbled, "it is possible that the townsfolk would be too intimidated to attempt anything against Shikodan directly."

"Well, should we go then?" K asked as his body glowed brightly before collapsing into its dragon form. "If we wait too long, the demon might end up checking things out herself."

"Yeah..." Ranma mumbled as he stared down at the town's palisade, watching as armed men dashed from other parts of the palisade to the gates. "Let's go."

* * *

Rakkyo's "lair" was as inappropriate a title as any could give to his place of residence, referred to as such only for the sake of irony and to keep fresh in Ranma's mind the fact that his former teacher and tormentor was, no matter how human his mannerisms or tastes, an inhuman magical beast.

Rakkyo lived - or rather, used to live - in a great mansion on a hill off of the edge of town. Constructed from marble and fine woods, it could only be described as a small palace, boasting a grand, well-trimmed yard, a reinforced balcony, and an attached observatory on the eastern wing. At the bottom of the hill surrounding the mansion were several fields belonging to nearby farmers, surrounding the bastion of class and wealth with rural charm and an ample supply of cheap food. Although the house lay outside the protective palisade that guarded the town, only the very powerful or the nearly powerless dared to approach the residence, for everything in-between could sense the kind of beast that slept within its confines, as well as their chances of surviving an attack.

At present, the aura dragon's home wasn't any worse off, despite its new occupant, although there were some changes. The aura of natural magic that permeated the grounds and made the plant life flourish had long waned, replaced by a subtle, malevolent energy, like a spider awaiting its prey. The garden plant life was still trimmed, but the gardening seemed haphazard and experimental, carving bushes into strange shapes and twisting vines into bizarre symbols.

Most of all, however, there were banners and guards where previously there were none. Great red tapestries emblazoned with a claymore pointing downward fluttered in the wind as men armed with AK-47s and wearing chain mail decorated with the same symbol stood watch at the mansion's entrance.

High above the gardens where the sentries waited, a single lithe figure laid back in a plush lounge chair with a glass of fruit juice at her side.

The woman was tall and curvaceous, with plump, full breasts that seemingly defied gravity beneath the thin white fabric of her simple sun dress, and her hair - boasting an unnatural shade of red that almost seemed to glow like a flame - was kept long such that it spilled out over the confines of her seat and pooled on the tile floor to resemble a shimmering lava flow.

At her back was a single elven man in a butler's uniform standing ramrod straight with a tray of drinks upon his fingers. Although his form was immaculately professional, his eyes wandered greedily over the redhead's body as she lazed about in the sun, either unaware of uncaring of the man's gaze.

The redheaded woman raised an eyebrow as she saw and explosion of some sort of black energy burst in the air over the town, and she sat up in her chair to gaze down at the settlement below.

"Diegon, is the town under attack? What was that?" she asked as she scanned the rooftops, her voice betraying very little in the way of excitement or concern.

"Hard to say, Lady Gehenna," the elf mumbled as he stepped up to the stone railing that surrounded the balcony. "If it is an attack, it's a small force. There's no indication of a full assault, and there are no organized groups of raiders in this area."

"Hmph. Still, something's going on down there," Gehenna said as she rested her chin on her fist. "Perhaps I should pay the township a visit?"

"If the incident is worth your attention, I'm sure that the town will send someone with word of the incident," Diegon droned, taking a drink from the tray and offering it to his mistress. "A goddess who constantly showers her followers with gifts and attention will make them dependent upon her."

Gehenna snorted and laid back in her chair. "I suppose. Not that I'm particularly worried about resolving any problems, but I am rather bored."

"Is there anything I can... do to help?" the elven butler asked, slyly, his lip curling into a smirk.

Suddenly, the redhead sat up once more. "Oh! Look, they did send a runner after all!"

With a disappointed frown, Diegon turned back toward the road leading up to the mansion and saw that there was a single man riding up the road on an army motorcycle; a rare piece of equipment, and one rarely used without great urgency.

After a few seconds the vehicle was slowing itself on approach to the mansion gate, and the guards stationed at the door promptly moved to intercept the rider, both of them overjoyed to have a break from the quiet monotony of their job.

Gehenna frowned as the rider barked something in Vietnamese, and the guards began a rather heated discussion with him. "What are they saying now? Blasted humans, did they really have to form a different language for every one of their different backwater hellholes?"

The elf chuckled as he closed his eyes, calming his thoughts in order to better pick up the conversation below. "Hmm. It seems Grimna has been murdered."

Gehenna raised an eyebrow. "Grimna? That filthy troll that the townsfolk haven't seen fit to kill off? That's what all the fuss is about?"

Diegon shrugged. "It would seem so. As you well know, he's a popular figure among the people."

"And they want ME to do something about it?" the redhead asked, sighing.

"Well... no, not really," Diegon admitted as he watched the two guards at the front get onto the motorcycle and head off toward the town. "They were just gathering more gunmen to help hunt down the killer, it would seem. They just made off with our guards."

"Ah. I see," Gehenna mumbled. After a few more seconds, she laid back down again. "You know, it might be interesting to watch a firefight again. It's been a while since I've seen true combat."

"Might I suggest inducting the murderer into your cult? Killing a troll isn't a simple feat. The one that accomplished it may be a worthwhile combatant," Diegon noted.

"Meh. Grimna was pacifistic, lazy, and naive," the redhead noted as she stood up from her chair. "Also, I hardly think I need a new thug badly enough to upset the townspeople. Let's let them be for now, but keep an eye out Diegon," she commanded as she sauntered into the mansion, "they may send another messenger if they decide they need my help."

"It is as you wish, Lady Gehenna," Diegon droned, bowing deeply to the redhead before he turned his gaze back toward the garden.

His eyes narrowed toward a momentary flash of light on the edge of the garden, and the butler frowned briefly before turning on his heel and following the redhead.

* * *

"Dammit K, I told you to get down!" Ranma whispered harshly as he held the metadragon close to his chest. "You reflect light way too easily! It's impossible to sneak with you around!" They were currently huddled behind one of the stone columns that separated the sections of fence that surrounded the front garden.

"I was just trying to get a better look at the bab-erm, our target!" K quickly corrected himself as Ranma glared at him.

"And? Did you?" Kaze asked eagerly.

"Nah. Just some elf dork," K said, clearly disappointed in his failure. "On the other hand, the guards're gone, so at least Rayden did his job right."

"Amen to that. Koz, you're up!" Ranma said as K hopped from his arms onto the evon's shoulder.

"I won't fail you, Master Saotome!" the priest of Malakai said firmly as he stood up and promptly marched toward the front gates, opening them with a sharp gesture of his hand and a burst of psionic energy.

"Just so you know," K said as he and Kaze marched through the garden, "me and Rayden have a bet going on how you're going to screw this up. He's betting that you'll let your guard down trying to get with the demon, while I'm guessing that someone's going to figure out your intentions and beat you senseless."

Kaze's face darkened as he walked up the steps toward the main entrance. "And why, pray tell, are you telling me about this wager?"

"To tilt it in my favor by keeping you on task long enough to get the tar beaten out of you," K said bluntly. "I already lost the bet with you that Rayden would screw up, so this is my only chance to break even."

"Do you ever think that perhaps our profiteer's approach to adventuring and camaraderie may be hurting our chances of success and potential as a fighting force?" Kaze asked bitterly as he stopped at the front doors and rapped on the thick wooden surface.

"Not any more than Rayden's constant, psychotic urge to kill sentient creatures just to watch them bleed," K reasoned. "Although in the long run, yeah, we kind of do make these jobs harder than they have to be."

The pair fell silent as the heavy doors creaked open, and Kaze's smile brightened considerably once he got a look at who was on the other side.

"Ah! They said that the prophetess was quite the beauty, but now that I see for myself, they don't begin to do you justice! With a face that would make angels drop from the sky, dumbfounded, it's no wonder so many have come to worship you!"

K sweatdropped as he stared down at the young Vietnamese girl at the entrance, who was dressed in a fine maid's outfit and had one eyebrow raised in confusion.

Frowning, the girl said something that Kaze had no chance of understanding, and K turned toward his current perch. "She wants you to know that if you're selling anything, they don't want any."

A tear slowly crept from the corner of Kaze's eye. "I, uh... I don't suppose you'd be willing to repeat my earlier-"

"No, I wouldn't," K snapped. "Also? Isn't that a little heavy-handed to spout at the bloody MAID?"

'That was such a great line, too.' Kaze sighed. "Very well. Tell the girl that I have business with the prophetess."

"Oh, so once your chance of bagging me is out the window, I'm not the beautiful prophetess anymore, huh? Men," the maid said in accented but fluent English before she turned around and entered the mansion. "Follow me, please."

Kaze's eyebrow twitched as he reluctantly followed the girl. "Damn cheeky little so-and-so... are people around here always this rude to men of the cloth?"

"You're not a man of any cloth that matters to me," the maid snapped, "and your mannerisms are more befitting the town lecher rather than the town priest."

"The trickery was quite unnecessary, nonetheless," the evon complained.

K brought his beak in close to whisper into Kaze's ear quietly enough that the girl couldn't hear. "Aren't you psychic? You should have been able to te-GWAH!" he shouted in surprise as Kaze bumped him off of his shoulder with his staff, and barely managed to land properly by madly flapping his wings.

"What's all the ruckus, now? Make sure to keep an eye on your pet; I work alone around here, and it's a big enough job without hair or scales or... whatever that thing might shed," the maid mumbled as she led Kaze and K through the antechamber and into a large sitting room.

"I'll... be careful," Kaze said dryly as K once again flapped his way back onto his shoulder.

"Oi, cheeky was right," K mumbled under his breath.

The maid stopped in the middle of the sitting room and gestured to a fine velvet couch next to a perpetually burning fireplace. "You may wait here for Lady Gehenna. What is your name and your reason for summoning her?"

"My name is Kaze Toren, the avatar of the Order of Malakai," Kaze said, drawing himself up in an effort to look impressive. "And the creature on my shoulder goes by the name of K. As for why we're here, I wish to discuss the possibility of opening up a temple within the town."

The maid raised an eyebrow, and then shrugged. "I'm not sure you're at the right place, but I'll alert the prophetess. Wait here."

Kaze waited until the girl walked out of the room before taking a seat on the couch, his body promptly sinking into the exquisitely comfortable furniture. "Master Saotome was right not to charge headlong into this matter. This situation is not so simple as our 'employer' made it out to be."

"Eh? Whatcha mean?" K asked as he morphed into human form to slump back in a chair opposite Kaze. "I mean, we haven't been here very long, and it's not like we've gathered much information."

"Look around you, K," the evon insisted. "These are not the trappings of a fanatical blood cult. The people here seem prosperous and at peace, and the cult itself operates openly without fear of persecution."

K raised an eyebrow as he put his feet up on the fine hardwood coffee table. "You saying that this religion is legit?"

"Not at all," Kaze reassured the dragon, "I'm merely saying that we're in no position to immediately resort to violence; Master Saotome was wise to send Shikodan to the town." His head turned sharply as his eyes narrowed. "Ah, they come."

Kaze tried to look relaxed and cool as the flame-haired beauty that he assumed to be the prophetess entered the room, herself looking quite bored as she approached. Still, the evon promptly found his eyes wandering to the demonic being's cleavage even as he cleared his throat and prepared a greeting in his head.

"And so the heart of this cult comes forth at once. I'm actually somewhat disappointed," Kaze murmured as he sighed, his eyes running up and down the exposed thighs of the woman. "I was expecting blood-crazed cultists guarding a burning altar with helpless sacrifices chained within rotting pits, or some such horrid thing. You seem like you'd be hard pressed to assemble a Sunday gathering for a sermon."

The woman silently looked Kaze up and down, her eyes hesitating at the mark of Malakai that decorated the priest's robes. "A priest of the Order, hm? You don't seem like you're here on a crusade, and you won't find too much injustice around here. Save maybe that fellow in the village slaughtering innocent forest life."

Kaze flinched ever so slightly. "I'm not here on official business. I simply wish to talk and discuss... matters of faith with you. My name is Kaze Toren, avatar of the Order of Malakai."

The redhead flinched back at hearing Kaze's title, and all traces of boredom and sloth fled her expression. "I see... I am Gehenna, prophetess of this shrine and a... local deity. What does an avatar wish of me?"

"Demons and things of shadow interest me, Gehenna," Kaze said simply, smiling as he leaned forward on the couch. "To that end, I heard of a demon weapon that had assembled a flock of followers in this sleepy, out of the way township. Tell me: what does a follower of the demon blade do to show his allegiance to his goddess?"

"The people here obey and worship me of their own free will," Gehenna said as she took a seat in a chair overlooking both Kaze and K (who had spent most of the conversation undressing Gehenna with his eyes). "I have harmed no one."

"You're lying," Kaze said, sighing wearily as he sat back. "Come now, there's no need for such feeble deceit; I do not intend to judge you. My interest in your cult is purely academic."

Gehenna scowled. "Forgive me for being unwilling to confess my sins to one of the infamous White Judges," she spat, invoking a less common name for the Malakai priests. "Your people are not known for overlooking sin."

"Well now," Kaze said smoothly as he grinned and steepled his fingers, "it depends on which sin."

Gehenna raised an eyebrow as K facepalmed. 'Damn it! No! I can't lose to Rayden too!' the metadragon thought.

"You hardly seem the vile dictator type," Kaze admitted, his expression looking insufferably smug, "so I imagine you simply use your powers to impress your magical abilities upon the townsfolk and demand tribute from them. In return you insist you'll protect them and may perform the occasional small miracle. Quite often there's a group that resist and are promptly put into use as living sacrifices, but as I noted before, yours seems quite a bit more laid-back."

Gehenna seemed to relax at Kaze's speech, and a small smile crossed her lips. "You are correct, of course. I have no need for sacrifices, and those townspeople that don't wish to pay homage to me are quite easily bullied or frightened into doing so; besides that, I do not take much from them. I have no aspirations aside from a quiet, peaceful existence surrounded by loyal servants. As for my 'religion', the cult is exactly what you say: a paper-thin front for my own satisfaction."

Gehenna laughed pleasantly, her breasts jiggling in such a way at to make Kaze forget what they were talking about and K forget that he needed to distract Kaze from their target long enough to get ambushed.

"These countryside peasants are so simple," the demoness gloated, crossing her arms under her chest and smirking at the effect it had on the men before her, "all I did was carve up a few wandering bandits and hack down a field of wheat, and before I knew it I was being praised as a gift from the heavens! It would be absurd not to take advantage of their idiocy!"

Kaze nodded absently, not really listening anymore.

"Ah, but it does get lonely sometimes," Gehenna said, suddenly sounding wistful as she cast a smoky gaze at the evon. "At night especially, sometimes I desire... intelligent... company."

Kaze gulped noisily as he straightened in his seat. "You don't say. Surely you're not suggesting-"

"That you join my cult? Well, I would hardly think to draw an AVATAR from his chosen faith for the promise of petty pleasures," she said with a smile in a voice that Kaze found almost haunting, "but simply keeping your 'research' into my activities to yourself and keeping me company would..." she trailed off, still smiling, "well, I would be happy to show you my appreciation... in private."

K promptly started shaking his head and mouthing 'no' toward the priest, but Kaze's leering grin betrayed his intentions as he stood up, his staff still lying on the couch. "I'm sure we can form some sort of... arrangement."

The reaction was instantaneous. The moment his all-important weapon was outside of arm's reach, Kaze felt a heavy blow to the small of his back that sent him staggering forward onto the floor, stunned.

"Yes! I win!" K shouted briefly - much to the confusion of Gehenna - before he leap over the back of his seat and hid.

As Kaze's nascent combat instincts finally awakened, the priest quickly turned onto his back, one arm outstretched and his mind stretching through the air to grab hold of his staff.

Yet it was too late, he discovered, his telekinesis failing as he noted a razor-tipped sword point at his neck. His gaze slowly traveling up the length of the blade, he was only slightly surprised to see that rather than a hilt, the sword ended at Gehenna's elbow, the flesh having turned to steel at some point during the surprise attack.

"Hmph. This is the quality of avatars nowadays? Pitiful," Diegon sneered as he tightened the gloves on his hands, his gaze flitting over toward the silver-haired boy. "Either this man is a liar, or the Order has truly and deeply declined in recent centuries."

"While neither of those assumptions are COMPLETELY wrong," K mumbled nervously as he poked his head out and stared at the blade held at Kaze's throat, "he actually is an avatar. That aside, though, we really aren't here to fight. Couldn't you just let us go?"

"Let you go? Why should your trespass be forgiven so easily?" Gehenna asked, a smile on her lips. "By all means, feel free to bargain for your life. You'll find I'm a most reasonable businesswoman when I have the upper hand."

Kaze frowned. "Bargain for **my** life? I'm afraid you do not grasp the situation you're in, milady."

Gehenna snorted. "And what have you to threaten me, evon? What magic is at your beck and call that can prevent me from making you a new breathing hole?"

"I have no such magic," Kaze admitted uncomfortably, "at least not without my staff. But you're not the only one with allies in the shadows."

_Thwack!_ Gehenna blinked in surprise as Diegon went flying past her, and looked up to see a young man she'd never seen before standing where her attendant had been a moment before.

Her eyes narrowed. "It's no small feat to sneak up on Diegon. Well done. But if you are this man's ally, you'd best stop where you-"

_Clang!_ Her threat was cut short as a pigtailed man identical to the first one kicked her sword-arm away from Kaze's neck, having appeared right next to her without warning.

"What in the-" with a flash of light, Gehenna's other hand quickly morphed into a sickle and lashed out toward the new attacker, but she was hardly able to match his speed when taken by a surprise. An open-palm strike sent her spinning across the room before slamming painfully into a bookshelf and rolling onto the floor.

"Kaze, you all right?" Ranma asked as his copy standing behind the couch flickered out of existence. "You sure didn't waste any time in letting your guard down."

The evon smirked as he picked himself up off the floor and dusted off his robes. "It's only thanks to you that I can afford to do so, Master Saotome. Having you for an ally would put anyone at ease." He promptly retrieved his staff from the couch as K crawled about and stood up next to him, huddling behind the taller men.

Ranma sweatdropped as Gehenna and Diegon picked themselves up off the floor, each of them eying the pigtailed man warily. "Okay, thanks for the vote of confidence, but you could still at least TRY not to get separated from your staff."

"And who might you be, scoundrel?" demanded Diegon, the elf's lip curling up in a sneer. "You invade the lair of the prophetess without a care. Plunderer? Assassin?"

"Wandering do-gooder," Ranma said simply, snapping up his magic katana in his right hand and letting the sheathed weapon spin about in his hand before grasping it tight. "Kaze, make with the magic. I'll deal with these two."

"Of course, Master Saotome!" Kaze said immediately, vanishing from sight and appearing in the doorway to the next room, safely out of lunging range of Diegon before rushing into the next room and out of sight.

Ranma's eyes flickered between Diegon and Gehenna, his mind working furiously to size up his opponents.

'The elf was really surprised to be attacked, but still managed to control his fall pretty well; obviously a pretty nimble guy. Might be a magic-user, too; I'm getting a weird vibe from him. As for the weapon...'

As Ranma's focus shifted from the elf to the demon, he couldn't help but blink at the redhead's expression. It looked pained and sympathetic, almost like... pity.

"Is THAT your weapon?" Gehenna asked, staring at the katana with undisguised contempt.

A vein throbbed on the side of Ranma's head. "Yeah. This is it. So how-"

"Do you want another one? We have others you can use if you want," Gehenna offered, seemingly unaware of Ranma's growing annoyance.

"Shut up! This rusty hunk of iron is more than enough to deal with the likes of you!" the pigtailed warrior declared, shifting into a combat stance. He noticed Diegon do the same, although the elf's was even looser and more idle-looking than Ranma's.

"Enough of this. I have decided," Gehenna said suddenly, her voice firm with determination. "You, young warrior. Your name is Saotome, correct?"

"Ranma Saotome. What of it?" Ranma asked suspiciously as K wandered up behind him.

"I, Gehenna of the hellforge Nahrun, razor talon of Kerakul, do submit myself to your service, Ranma Saotome," the redhead said seriously, falling to one knee in front of him.

"L-Lady Gehenna!" Diegon shouted, his eyes widening.

"Hold your tongue, Diegon!" Gehenna demanded, staring up at Ranma with eyes that shimmered with an unearthly green glow. "For many centuries I have searched for a warrior such as you. I can feel the inner might waiting to be unleashed; the martial supremacy simmering beneath the surface! I can see it, now! Take me, mighty Saotome, and allow me to be the key to unlock your full potential!"

"S-Seriously?" Ranma asked, rubbing the back of his head in confusion as Diegon scowled angrily. "But, well, I kind of already have plenty of weapons..."

"Such rubbish is hardly fit for a prodigy of the arts of war!" Gehenna insisted, her arms reverting to smooth, silky skin as she stretched her left hand toward Ranma. "Take my hand, Saotome, and let us be bound forevermore in blood and fire!"

K's eyes cringed nervously as Ranma stepped forward. "Wh-Whoa, Ranma. Wait a sec, this might be-"

"Don't worry about it K, I got this," Ranma said happily as he grasped Gehenna's outstretched arm, his left hand closing firmly around her wrist. "I've been looking for something to replace this old hunk of rust anyway. Let's see what she's got."

Almost immediately, Gehenna's body turned into pure magical light, and the woman's body seeped into Ranma's hand before extending outward in the shape of a sword blade.

Further it lengthened, the blade curving upward as it passed the normal length of a katana, and then after a few more moments the energy burst apart to reveal gleaming steel.

Gehenna had taken the form of a nodachi, its four-foot blade shining brilliantly in the late morning light. The sword was elegant, yet unadorned, with no hilt guard and a simple handle wrapped tightly in leather binding.

"It would seem... the prophetess has indeed chosen you," Diegon said, resentment punctuating every syllable.

"Yeah, how about that?" Ranma asked conversationally as he swung the sword around haphazardly with one hand, his strokes short and clumsy due to the sword's length and weight. After a few seconds of testing, Ranma held the sword straight forward in front of him, staring down the length of the blade.

K's eyes widened as he sensed a magical surge. "Ranma! Look out!"

_Clingk!_ K's warning was shouted at nearly the exact same time as the handle of the blade suddenly lengthened to a needle point that thrust toward Ranma's throat, the metal twisting viciously so as to better pierce flesh and inflict a mortal wound.

Instead, however, the needle point smashed into a sheathe of black material harder even than its enchanted metal, stopping the deadly spike in place.

"Wh-What?" Gehenna's voice emanated from the sword despite the lack of a mouth and managed to contain confusion obvious enough to make up for her not having a face to express it visually. Ranma's right hand, sheathed in its mysterious black gauntlet, had protected his neck from the treacherous protrusion, and even now held the spike firm.

"Don't think I'm as easy to fool as Kaze," Ranma deadpanned, his eyes betraying neither surprise nor anger at the attempt at murder, "didn't you even stop to wonder why I would take you with the left hand?"

Gehenna didn't bother to answer, and didn't need to. Ranma barely backed out of the way as Diegon blew past, knocking K over onto his back as he avoided the elf's skillful kick.

"Ow! Watch it!" the metadragon complained as he tried to crawl away.

"If you wanna stay out of the way, go to dragon form!" Ranma shouted as his grip on Gehenna shifted and he stepped forward, slicing at Diegon from far outside of the elf's reach.

To Ranma's surprise, his opponent deliberately grabbed hold of the tip of the nodachi, and was rewarded as the metal seemed to melt into his hands rather than cutting them apart.

"Shoot!" Ranma cursed as the blade in his hands began to shift entirely, fighting against the pressure of his grasp, and he let go of his end just as the entire weapon swelled into that of a great spear... with the pointy end facing him.

"You're the worst weapon ever!" Ranma complained as Gehenna suddenly lengthened in a crude attempt to skewer him, forcing him to dodge to the side. "I'll take my rusty old Ninja blade any day!"

"Then by all means, draw your wretched tool, imbecile!" Gehenna intoned as she shrunk back to normal length and allowed Diegon time to adjust his combat stance properly to account for the weapon. "I'll put you both out of your misery!"

* * *

"Get back here, you wretch!"

"Kill the bastard!"

"Shoot him! Shoot him now!"

_Budda-budda-budda-budda!_ Rayden leapt from the top of the wooden palisade as 7.62 mm bullets sailed all around him, a few digging through his trench coat and sinking into his flesh but most scattering to the wind as twisted, leaden testament to the townsfolks' lack of proper training with the few firearms they had.

Rayden landed heavily on the ground outside the town, and the demon knight stopped to crack his back for a moment as the shouting on the other side of the barricade got louder.

"Damn. Think one of them got in a soft spot," he grumbled as he scratched his back with a hand, causing a few flattened bullets to tumble onto the ground along with a few specks of blood. "Oh well, time to go."

Still regretting that he hadn't had the opportunity to do more than stir up trouble, the Dread Knight jogged toward the forest at a leisurely pace, the sounds of angry civilians becoming more and more distant.

Before long, he was within the dark forest canopy that surrounded the town with no indication of pursuit.

"Well, that wasn't hard," Rayden said as he glanced around. "Now I have to find myself something to do until Rakkyo does his thing." He scratched his chin as he continued forward, blindly pushing through the underbrush of the dense woods. "Well, I guess I could stop and get the rest of the bullets out of my body," he said to himself, idly scratching a few of the blood-rimmed holes that were scattered over his trench coat, "or I could go fishing."

After a few more seconds of thought, the prospect of a good dinner won out over first aid. "I think we could all use some fresh food for once, and Rakkyo is sure to have a good kitchen. Fishing it is."

"I'm afraid your fishing trip has been canceled on account of rain," a voice boomed suddenly from above, startling the demon knight.

"What? Rain?" Rayden asked, staring upward at the forest canopy, "I don't see any ra-"

_Bwoom! Bwoom! Bwoom!_ Almost immediately, great beams of blue light lanced into the ground from the sky above the forest, detonating upon the ground with terrific force that promptly knocked Rayden off his feet.

_Bwoom! Bwoom! Bwoom! Bwoom! Bwoom!_ The Dread Knight grit his teeth as magical detonations rang out all around him in rapid sequence, the ground shaking and trees sent flying as their roots and much of their trunks were vaporized in clouds of searing blue and crackling white.

"Hey! Knock it off!" Rayden screamed, unsheathing Darkrune and pushing himself to his feet as he caught a glimpse of another light beam descending straight down onto him from above.

_Bwam!_ A muted explosion broke the horrific cacophony of detonations as Rayden cleaved upward through the magic missile, slicing the beam in half and causing the entire thing to collapse into a burst of energy more akin to a firecracker than a missile.

Keeping his blade at the ready, Rayden glared up through the forest canopy, now thoroughly perforated due to the beams of scorching magic and the collapse of several trees.

"Ah, prey that fights back. My favorite kind," the voice from above cackled as its owner lowered itself into view.

Perfectly white eyes shining with power gazed down at the Dread Knight within an otherwise featureless face of pure, crackling energy, and arcs of iridescent lightning surged around limbs that literally boiled with power.

"My name is Demetrius Yaermon, little swordsman," the demon lord boomed, a clawed hand pointing toward Rayden. "Tell me where your companions are, and your death will be swift."

Rayden blinked as he recognized the name. "Demetrius Yaermon? Of the Three Legions? Seriously?"

Demetrius halted in his descent. "Yes, it is I. Naturally, you've heard of me. Then surely you're aware that your death is nigh."

"Of course I've heard of you! Man, you kicked ass back in Russia!" Rayden said, sticking Darkrune in the ground and resting his arms on it. "I was actually part of the mercenary unit that demolished the Kremlin! Name's Rayden Shikodan!"

The psilor had no eyelids with which to blink, but nonetheless gave the distinct impression of being confused and uncomfortable at the amiable admiration coming from his victim. "Ah, yes. At the time the humans had whittled my legions down to almost nothing, so it was necessary to rely on mercenaries."

"Yeah, that's how it goes. Hey, I thought you'd died, though!"

Demetrius barked out a laugh as he descended all the way to the ground, his arms crossed over his chest. "These feeble humans could not destroy me even while I was bound and powerless! The weakling race of men is nothing before my might!" he boasted, raising one hand which was promptly consumed in black fire. "Ah... seriously, though... where is the human Ranma Saotome?"

"Eh? I dunno," Rayden said simply.

It was true, too. While Ranma had laid out all the details of his plan to infiltrate Rakkyo's mansion before they had set out, Rayden had stopped listening as soon as his role had been decided.

The flames vanished as Demetrius slumped. "Truly? Damnation, this is a tiresome task. Assassination is truly a grueling art."

"I know, right? We warriors have it easy," Rayden agreed, nodding sagely. "Hey, don't you have a daughter in the Third Brotherhood?"

Demetrius straightened immediately. "Sonia? What of her?" At that moment, the demon lord finally took a careful look at his (former) victim. "Ah! So you are of the flock of Kharak! Tell me, how is my darling Sonia?"

"She's doing pretty good. Back when I last saw her she was extorting money from innocent villages by threatening to burn them to the ground."

"Just like her father at that age," Demetrius said, the note of parental pride unmistakable in his booming voice. "It's good to know she is still well. I had some concerns about her position in your order after the Third fell from power."

"Yeah, well, we still get by," Rayden said, shrugging as he picked up Darkrune and sheathed the weapon. "Hey, I was going to head down to the coast and scope out a fishing spot. You wanna come?"

"Certainly!"

* * *

"Perish, interloper!" Diegon shouted as he swung the great spear in a wide arc, forcing Ranma back out of its considerable reach.

The elf immediately swung his weapon back along the same arc of attack as Gehenna morphed the head of the spear into a curving scythe blade that seemed to reach out for its target's body like a beast's talon.

Ranma hissed as he dove to one side, the edge of the scythe blade slicing easily through his leather armor and nicking the flesh beneath.

In a blur of motion he launched a kunai at his elven foe, and was reasonably surprised when Diegon snapped it up out of the air without trouble, leaving one arm to heft his living weapon.

The elf quickly tossed it back at its owner, but Ranma was prepared. Dashing toward Diegon, Ranma almost casually avoided the quick and panicked toss of the throwing knife and then grabbed hold of Gehenna's haft with his gauntleted hand, using the extra leverage to add strength to a punishing blow straight into the elf's chest.

Gehenna seemed to melt out of his grip as Diegon went flying back, knocking over a plush chair and breaking apart the arm before he managed to bounce to his feet once more.

"Okay, I think I've got a good measure of what you're capable of," Ranma said as he once again brought his hand to the katana at his hip. "Last chance to give up, by the way."

"If you're still willing to draw that shabby fish knife you call a weapon," Gehenna said as she morphed from scythe to a silvery rapier, "then you have no idea what I'm capable of."

"Talk is cheap," Ranma said as he drew his rusted and shortened katana.

The pigtailed man hadn't been expecting or hoping for an extended sword fight, but even he was honestly shocked by how short it really was.

With blinding speed Ranma dashed forward, aiming to cut into the shoulder of his opponent, and well aware that rapiers were thrusting weapons, almost useless for defense.

It was certainly that knowledge that assured his surprise when Diegon slashed at the incoming blade, although there was no way Ranma could have been prepared for what happened next.

The thin, flexible blade of Gehenna's rapier form bent sharply upon contact with the katana, and then the blade curled and wrapped around the rusted weapon it had struck, binding it tightly.

As surprised as he was, Ranma quickly noted that his enemy was open, and a swift kick sent Diegon sprawling once again, Gehenna finally leaving his hand as he was doubled over by the blow.

For her part, Gehenna wrapped further and further around Ranma's magic blade, her form seemingly melting around the blade edge and seeping down toward the hilt.

"The hell? What is this?" Ranma shouted, tossing his weapon onto the ground as the liquid metal form of Gehenna consumed it completely.

After a few seconds, Gehenna's form shifted to that of a bastard sword, and Diegon did his best to look smug as he staggered over to the demonic weapon and picked it up.

"Wait. Wait, wait, wait," Ranma demanded, pointing to Gehenna angrily. "Where's my sword? What happened to it?"

"It is a part of me, now," Gehenna said smugly, "its metal consumed, its magic stolen, and its form..." the disembodied voice trailed off, "well, the less said about its form, the better."

"You're saying you ATE my sword?" Ranma asked, slapping a hand over his face.

"If it's any consolation, it tasted awful," Gehenna offered.

"Amen, sister," K mumbled in agreement.

Diegon cleared his throat as he approached Ranma with Gehenna in his grasp. "Now then, since you're unarmed, would you like to surrender, or-"

Before the elf could complete that sentence, Ranma threw his arm to once side, causing a sheathed katana to slide out of his sleeve into his waiting hand.

As Diegon's words died in his mouth, the pigtailed boy glared at Gehenna. "So, you going to eat this one, too?"

"I only consume magical we-" Gehenna began to explain before she cut herself off. "No, wait, forget that, where the hell did that thing come from? There's no way you were hiding that in your sleeve!"

"Ancient Chinese secret," Ranma said simply. "Now then, I think it's about time we ended this."

Diegon snorted as he slid into a new combat stance appropriate for Gehenna's current form. "Don't get ahead of yourself, young one. Without so much as a magic blade, you really think to defeat the demon blade Gehenna and the blademaster Diegon?"

"Not really, no," Ranma admitted as he lowered his own weapon. "Rakkyo gave me a great idea so that I don't have to. He has this teleportation circle in his study, and he suggested that I lure you to it in order to simply warp you away to someplace where you can't do any harm."

Diegon and Gehenna were silent for several seconds.

"We're in the sitting room," Diegon noted.

"And you just revealed the extent of your clever strategy," Gehenna deadpanned.

Ranma smirked as magical runes started appearing across the walls, lines of magic seeping into the building itself as he stepped back. "Yeah, well, when you know a half-decent magic user, sometimes you can work around all the annoying little conditions like certain magical portals being located in certain places." He lowered his sword and waved to the startled elf as eldritch light filled the room. "Bye bye now!"

"Wait! Master Saotome! Something's wrong!" Kaze shouted, promptly killing the smug smile on Ranma's face. "I'm not-"

And then, in a flash of magical light, Ranma, Kaze, K, Diegon, and Gehenna all vanished as they were swept across the continent.

* * *

Rakkyo sighed in relief as he stopped channeling magical power into the teleportation matrix Kaze had set up, glad that his plan had worked.

As usual, Ranma had managed to surprise him, simply having his personal wizard modify the existing teleportation spell rather than drawing the enemy to the established gate. To say nothing of him actually approaching the unwanted occupier and learning about her rather than simply attacking and driving her out. And they actually had the nerve to expect a reward!

"Well, that's all over and done with," the aura dragon said, planting his fists on his hips. "Ah! I should go find those hover... things that Ranma had! I'm sure the townsfolk could find some proper use for them for the right price!"

Rakkyo practically skipped as he made his way back down from his mansion, overjoyed that he had once again managed to throw one enemy into the jaws of another and saved himself a lot of personal grief. It was an age-old talent of his that more often than not handily made up for his poor combat abilities. Some called it cowardice, but Rakkyo tended to consider such people idiots who didn't know any better.

"Speaking of idiots that don't know any better..." Rakkyo mumbled as he halted his progress toward the forest, sweat beading upon his brow as he saw who approached. It was Rayden Shikodan, a net full of giant fish tails over his shoulder as he pushed the hoverbikes along over the ground, one on each hand.

"Oi! Dragon! They done in there, yet?" Rayden called as he caught sight of Ranma's old master, immediately picking up the pace.

Rakkyo's eyes wandered for several seconds as the demonic paladin approached, and finally he cleared his throat and spoke.

"Ah! There you are! I've been looking all over for you!" Rakkyo said, planting his hands on his hips as he glared at the Dread Knight. "Everyone else has already left!"

Rayden blinked. "What? Left? Left for where?"

"Mongolia, of course! Didn't you hear that you were going back immediately?" Rakkyo said, clicking his tongue as he turned and gestured for Rayden to follow. "It's a lucky thing I found you! You were almost left behind!"

Rayden raised an eyebrow as he followed the aura dragon up the slope surrounding the mansion. "Really? They left without me?" He thought about it for a moment, frowning. "Okay, I guess I can believe that they'd leave me behind if they needed to, but why would they leave all our stuff? These bikes are supposed to be expensive."

"They were in quite a hurry," Rakkyo said as he opened the gate to his garden, rushing toward the front doors to his newly liberated home. "You'd best follow at once without giving any critical thought to what I'm telling you."

"Can do!" Rayden said as he followed Rakkyo up to the main doorway.

Rakkyo swung open the door, but halted as a young girl in a maid outfit barred his way.

Looking up at him, the maid grimaced. "You're back?"

"I am," Rakkyo answered proudly.

"I quit," the maid responded, tossing her beret onto the floor as she walked into the garden, past Rayden and then out the gates.

"What was THAT all about?" Rayden asked as he followed Rakkyo into the mansion, carefully maneuvering the floating vehicles one by one through the entryway.

"Oh, you know how human are. Fickle to the extreme," Rakkyo answered without actually answering. "So! I assume you're ready to go at once, yes? Simply stand right there and wait for me to power the telepor-"

"Hold it!" Rayden shouted, his face grim. "There is one thing I have to do first before I leave!"

"What's that?" Rakkyo said, clearly impatient to get rid of the dark paladin.

_Whump!_ The aura dragon doubled over in agony as Rayden slammed a fist into his stomach.

"Wh... Why?" Rakkyo asked weakly, tears squeezing from the corners of his eyes.

"Because I hate you," Rayden said simply as he backed away, holding the hover bikes and their packs full of supplies close to his sides. "Now make with the magic, loser. I don't have all day."

* * *

"Son of BITCH!" Ranma shouted to the heavens as he looked out at barren plains of Mongolia, a small group of wild herd animals starting and dashing away at the sudden noise.

Kaze cringed away from his leader and instructor before scrubbing his head with his hand. "I do apologize Master Saotome, but it would seem that Rakkyo has taken extensive precautions to prevent errant magic users from accessing his home from afar. There's no way I can decipher the portal from this end without his help.

"I knew it! I knew it was a mistake to trust him!" Ranma said almost rabidly as he stomped the ground. "He was scheming that the whole time! I knew he was lying the whole time!"

"Whoa, let's not go nuts, here," K said gently. "I mean, sure, he did teleport us out to the middle of nowhere, leaving us stranded with the enemy with no supplies and one of our group missing..."

K hesitated for a few seconds as he stopped to recall what his point was. "But... well, that doesn't mean that he was lying. Kaze said he was clean, remember?"

Kaze nodded in agreement. "Indeed. And I regardless of our own fate, we did successfully drive out an unlawful invader," he said sagely, trying desperately to contain his own tormented emotions over the loss of potential gain.

A sudden snort came from behind the three men. "Unlawful invader? Is that what he told you?"

Gehenna rested lazily on a rock in her human form, Diegon standing by her side at attention while he glared murderously at the people responsible for their sudden departure from the mansion.

"I am no invader. Rakkyo gave that property to me fairly," Gehenna insisted, her arms crossed under her breasts.

"Eh? Why would he give you anything?" K asked, looking suspicious even while the redhead held Ranma's undivided attention.

"It was a simple bargain;" the demon weapon said in bitter remembrance. "As a demonic weapon, my existence is a series of contracts. For one to wield me, I demand one's soul." Then she snorted. "But the aura dragon had no use for a weapon. No, he wished for... 'other favors'. And I provided them, in exchange for my freedom and his home rather than his life and immortal spirit."

"I don't think it needs to be said that this does not mesh with what he told us about you," Kaze said dryly. "Although I wouldn't mind hearing about more of these other fa-" a swift kick to the shins from Ranma quickly silenced the evon as he fought to endure the pain.

"No doubt," Gehenna spat. "After I... completed my part of the bargain, Rakkyo proved extremely reluctant to relinquish his control over me, much less surrender any of his own assets. With our contract broken, I was able to bring my full power to bear, and he in turn transformed into his true form, intent on teaching me my place," she explained, running a hand through her long, lustrous hair. "It didn't take long to pummel the lizard into submission, honestly. Since defeating him actually granted that which I wanted and completed the contract, and with nothing better to do with him, I had him sold to a slaver caravan rather than killing him."

Kaze looked quite disturbed as he mulled this over, and Ranma shook his head. "Nice try, lady. I may not trust Rakkyo, but I do trust Kaze's psychic abilities, and he said that the old lecher was telling the truth about you infiltrating his home and tricking him."

"Psychic abilities?" Gehenna asked, snorting, "against that aura dragon? You may as well ask him to swear on a Christian bible. Both are meaningless to one such as him."

Ranma blinked. "What? What do you mean?"

"Aura dragons have iron wills that can block most psychic effects to a great degree," Diegon said reluctantly, shaking his head at the stupidity of the adventurers. "A skilled liar, on the other hand, can stretch these abilities further to fool them outright. I've no doubt that Rakkyo has had to combat the sensibilities of skilled psions on many an occasion."

Ranma's eyes locked onto Kaze as the priest gulped, beads of sweat crawling down his forehead. "Kaze? Is that actually possible? Are they telling the truth right now?"

"Ah... well... it's hard for me to say," the evon blustered, fidgeting nervously. "I mean, there are certainly instances of certain individuals who can fool the probing mental energies of the psychics, but these tend to be the exception rather than the rule, and... although I don't detect any dishonesty from them at the moment, by their own admission, it's entirely possible that..."

Kaze trailed off as fire started to build all around Ranma's body, curling around the young warrior's arms and legs as his eyes hardened with a hatred darker and sharper than anything he had seen come from Rayden. "Uh... I would like to point out that I was unaware of this ability and interpreted Rakkyo's intentions in good faith."

"And **I** would like to point out that this means you probably did gain your amazing abilities entirely through your own effort and bloody-minded willpower, which is really cool!" K said desperately, trying to calm Ranma down as flaming wrath encompassed the pigtailed man.

Gehenna and Diegon shrunk back from the sight of the flames encompassing the young man. "Uh... is he okay?" the redheaded woman asked.

"Okay? Okay! Why wouldn't I be okay?" Ranma said, his voice taking a manic edge as his eyes locked onto the living weapon. "I mean, all I did was trust the sob story of my worst enemy, attack a relatively innocent person, and then enact a cunning plan only to get double-crossed and thrown halfway across the continent without my gear! Do you really think a little thing like that would upset me?" he demanded, the flames flaring around him and pushing the demoness and her attendant back.

Gehenna was at a loss for words, but Diegon promptly stood between the two, his gaze as cold as Ranma's was furious. "You have every right to regret your stupidity," the elf said haughtily, "but take care not to direct your rage at Lady Gehenna. I will not allow her to come to harm as a result of your folly."

Ranma glared up at the elf. "Can I take it out on YOU, then?"

Kaze was about to make another attempt to soothe Ranma's anger when he sensed another surge of magic. "Master Saotome! Someone else is coming!"

Everyone turned as a flash of light appeared at the edge of the gathering, and Ranma's hand promptly filled with daggers as he grasped the possibility that it could be Rakkyo.

In the end, however, it was merely Rayden, the demon knight waving happily as he hauled the party's hovering cargo carriers behind him.

"Hey guys! Why'd you take off so quickly?" Rayden asked as he approached. "The townspeople weren't THAT mad, were they?"

"Our equipment! Fantastic!" Kaze said, brightening considerably as he saw the hoverbikes. "I feared they were lost for good!"

"Yeah, speaking of which, I know you guys are eager to get to the next great adventure and whatnot, but you shouldn't just leave your stuff behind when you do so," the Dread Knight chided, stopping next to the group. It was about at this time that he noticed that Ranma seemed to be on fire. "Am I interrupting a fight here, or is Ranma just really angry?"

"Ray," Ranma said suddenly, his voice laced with icy fury, "tell me that you hit Rakkyo before you left."

Rayden blinked. "Of course I did."

The flames around the pigtailed man immediately flickered away. "Did you hit him hard?"

"I'm pretty sure I crushed a minor organ or two, yeah."

The dark paladin started as Ranma suddenly surged forward and grabbed him into a crushing hug. "Wh-What? What's-"

"I'm sorry! I should have listened to you! You were right all along!" Ranma cried, holding the larger man tightly. "Thank you! You're the best friend a guy could ever have!"

"Did... something happen?" Rayden asked slowly, scratching his head.

"I'd rather not speak further on the topic," Kaze mumbled.

"If that's the case, I have a different topic to discuss," Diegon said suddenly as he gained everyone else's attention. "I would like you to take responsibility for your actions today."

Ranma released his subordinate and took a moment to gather his dignity before responding. "Oh really? How's that, exactly?"

"You have deprived us of a home, and left us stranded in the middle of nowhere," Gehenna said as she stood up, "it's only fair that you serve me from this point on to make up for your actions."

Rayden promptly glanced toward Ranma. "Who are they, and how bad would you feel if I broke them into little pieces?"

"They're idiots, and I would feel a little guilty, so no," Ranma explained with a wave of his hand.

Diegon's teeth clenched. "Idiots? Says the fool who was tricked into working for that lecherous dragon."

Ranma's eye twitched. "Okay, I think I wouldn't mind if the elf was maimed a little."

"Tch! Such idiocy will not go unpunished," Diegon said as he reached a hand back toward Gehenna. "Lady Gehenna, let us slay these fools and simply take their..." he trailed off as he noticed that the warm, silk-soft touch of his weapon and mistress was still absent from his fingers, and he turned to regard the redhead in question. "Lady Gehenna?"

The demon weapon had an expression of abject horror on her face as she stared at Rayden, who was drawing Darkrune from the ornate sheath on his back. "That... this is... h-how did you..."

"Lady Gehenna, we must defend ourselves!" Diegon said firmly, still standing tall as he offered her his hand. "With my skill combined with your might, we are invincible! No matter what manner of weapon the opponent brings to bear, I will serve it to you as mere feed!"

Rather than encouraging the redhead, this prospect seemed to terrify her even more, and she shrunk back as the dark paladin approached.

"So," Rayden said conversationally as he came within arm's reach of the elven blademaster, reaching out for the man's shoulder with his free hand, "what was that about slaying us all?"

In response to his question, Diegon drew a hidden knife and turned toward the approaching demon, plunging the blade upward underneath Rayden's ribcage and slicing through the dark paladin's tough flesh to pierce his lung.

It was entirely understandable, given the severe wound he had just inflicted, that Diegon was quite surprised when Rayden simply used the elf's proximity to grab hold of the top of his head, ignoring the burning agony that was coming from his chest.

_Crack!_ Kaze and K winced as Rayden twisted the elf's head sharply, snapping Diegon's neck like a bread stick. The blademaster's corpse collapsed to the ground a second later.

With a pained grunt, Rayden slowly drew the fine elven dagger out of his body, inwardly marveling at the elf's skill to have struck a normally mortal blow so quickly and easily within his guard. "Oof. That's gonna hurt a lot until it heals," the Dread Knight mumbled before tossing the weapon onto the ground and turning back to his friends. "So! Who's hungry?"

Ranma's eyes were drawn not to the sack of fish meat that had been tied to his hoverbike, but rather to Gehenna, who was suddenly encompassed by a flare of light as her form shrunk and finally coalesced into that of a short sword. "Why's she turning into a weapon NOW?"

Rayden blinked, and then glanced back at the blade lying on the ground. "Demon weapon, right? That guy must've been her wielder. He dies, she absorbs his soul, their contract is fulfilled, she's back to waiting for another poor schmuck to latch on to."

"Ah, is that how it works?" Kaze said, rubbing his chin. "So she absorbs souls as well as magical weapons, does she?"

"Actually, that reminds me," Rayden said, stooping down over the dead elf's body. "Shakal del fauh gonoh hoon. Those that fall in battle be released from mortal concerns, their balance restored as they forge their final path unto oblivion. Depart, fallen warrior," he intoned grimly as he pressed a hand against the elf's still chest, his hand glowing with a dark, yet somehow gentle energy.

The others watched with undisguised interest as a gray mist began to rise from Diegon's rapidly cooling body before a single mote of shimmering light escaped upward into the air.

"Kharak approves of those who die in combat, and thinks it a waste for those souls to be entrapped in the mortal world rather than moving on to the release of death," Rayden explained as he stood up. "This is one soul that got lucky."

Ranma stared morbidly at Diegon's body, lying mangled on the ground, and his gaze wandered over to the demon sword Gehenna, the late blademaster's weapon and yet also his master, a prison that had empowered him and yet, at the elf's final moments, had forsaken him out of fear of its own existence.

He turned toward Rayden. "So, you said something about food?"

* * *

"You're kidding? All that stuff was a lie?" Rayden asked as he served the others great steaks of marinated fish. "Man, if I'd known that, I would've at least broken a limb or two before I made him teleport me after you guys."

"Well, technically we just know that he **can** lie to us," K admitted as he cleaned off Diegon's long knife, making sure it was free of Rayden's dark, oily blood before he bit off the tip.

"Don't even start, K," Ranma growled as he bit off a chunk of fish. "As far as I'm concerned Rakkyo is a dead man. If he doesn't worship a god yet, he'd better find one to pray to that I never find myself within a hundred miles of his home again. I'll burn it to the ground with him in it."

"Still, what's to be done about Gehenna?" Kaze asked between mouthfuls. "Do we really intend to leave her there on the ground?"

"Leave 'it' there on the ground," Ranma corrected. "Don't let those breasts fool you-"

"Again," K quickly piped up before he started chewing on the knife's handle.

"-that... **thing** over there is not humanoid. It takes that shape purely to confuse people and put them at ease," Ranma said, waving a fork at Kaze as his knife cut off another hunk of meat. "As for what we're going to do with it, I haven't decided yet. I'm not keen on bargaining my soul away, but Gehenna did eat my magic sword."

"Good riddance to that thing, I say," K mumbled as he finished off the knife. "She was doing you a favor."

"Oh, shut up! That thing was a gift!" Ranma protested as the metadragon stuck out his tongue at him.

Kaze sighed as he finished his steak and took a drink of water from a small canteen. "It's a shame we couldn't stay in the village longer; we still haven't had any opportunity to replenish our supplies, and I rather wanted to see those merfolk Rakkyo spoke of."

"Assuming he wasn't lying about those, too," Ranma grumbled.

"You know, I heard that if you eat the flesh of mermaids, it grants immortality," K said, his voice grim and serious.

Rayden snorted. "That's not true. I don't even know how a silly story like that came about."

"Oh, come now," Kaze said, patting the Dread Knight on the shoulder, "not that I'm advocating the murder and consumption of merfolk, but don't you think that, with all the strange and impossible things that have turned up in the realms, something like that is hardly far-fetched?"

The demonic paladin rolled his eyes. "Well, do any of you **feel** immortal?"

All eating halted immediately.

Ranma stared down at his third steak of the night, his fork trembling over the tender, juicy meat. "Ray... why would you ask that?" He glanced over at the net that still held a fair bit of uncooked fish meat. "Those aren't mermaids, right? They don't look like mermaids at all." They looked like the bodies of large tuna, actually, although Ranma noticed with considerable discomfort that the net only contained the rear half of the creatures.

"Well, you have to cut off the top halves; that meat's no good, and can even be poisonous in certain tribes," Rayden explained. "And don't get me wrong; merfolk are lean and full of vitamins, and as I'm sure you've noticed, the subtle sweetness is far superior to mere fish. But I hardly think any of you are gonna get an extra year of life out of this meal."

Kaze held a hand over his mouth as he pushed away his plate, his face paling. Ranma's fingers shook as he calmly set down his food.

"I've lost my appetite," Ranma said simply, standing up and walking away from the camp site.

"I must go at once and meditate on this matter," Kaze mumbled as he staggered to his feet. "I am not sure to what degree cannibalism is treated as an injustice in the eyes of Malakai."

"What are you talking about? It's not cannibalism, merfolk are a different species!" Rayden insisted as the two men wandered off, both of them looking slightly ill.

"Geez, what a waste," the Dread Knight sighed as he pulled a steak of his own from the spit and bit into it. "That was some of the best merfolk fishing I've had in a good long while, too."

"I'm damn glad I'm a lithovore," K mumbled as he popped a penny in his mouth, looking plenty disturbed by the turn of events but apparently maintaining his appetite.

"Bah, everyone's a critic."

* * *

End Chapter 17 


	18. Roots of Madness

Species: Hemolithus Zephromorphous Sapien

Common name: Blood Angel

Class: Demon (?)

Subspecies: None

Sentience & Intelligence: Relatively high. There is little data on common variation due to an unusually small sample population, but the species seems to be on par with other angels, if not humans, as far as their intellectual development is concerned.

Physical biology: Blood angels show an unsurprising similarity with angels in their biology, with a few notable and very profound differences. The most obvious is that the species possesses wings despite the fact that they are completely unusable for flight; the black, bony spines that jut from their backs seem to serve no useful purpose, and are only a nuisance in the field of aerodynamics. The other main difference is that whereas an angel's bones are hollow, a blood angel's are filled with an ultra-dense compound which seems to fulfill the same biological purpose of bone marrow. Not only does this make the skeleton more than six times as heavy as a human's, but it makes the individual bones extremely resilient; blood angel bones will only break under enormous levels of trauma.

Mana resonance: Extremely high. Blood angels can naturally leech mana from their bodies and the atmosphere in order to use various magics, most commonly in the form of explosive energy projectiles. Other forms that have been noted are energy shields and a persisting form of necrotic corruption which, when deployed, can spread over an area and have disastrous effects on all living creatures that come in contact with it. It is also widely surmised that blood angels use their magic to enhance their bodies for combat purposes.

Lifespan: Blood angels, unlike other demons, do not live longer than normal humans. Perhaps because of the persisting chemical or magical corruption caused by their need to absorb blood plasma - if not the absorption itself - a blood angel's health and sanity seems to degrade rapidly after half a century. Judging by uncomfirmed reports, this corruption either manifests in a physical way, mutating the creature beyond its body's ability to sustain, or the creature flies into a permanent state of psychotic madness, requiring it to be destroyed.

Diet: Omnivorous. Blood angels seem to have very human-like diets, although unsurprisingly they tend to favor meat.

Biological anomalies: The most curious and interesting biological anomaly - for there are many - that concerns the blood angels is that their blood absorbs other creatures' blood plasma. Unlike other blood-drinking creatures, the blood angel does not need or get nutrients from the blood, and it is unknown what, exactly, the blood contains that the blood angel consumes. It is known that if deprived of blood for an extended period of time, a blood angel's brain wave activity begins to drop, and eventually they enter a violent and psychotic state of mind (if you could consider their normal state of mind to be peaceful and sane, which this researcher cannot). This has been dubbed by others as a "blood riot". The blood angel's "wings" are actually threaded with hundreds of blood vessels which absorb the blood right through the curiously permeable surface, usually via some sort of magic effect that draws spilt blood to the creature. Once the foreign blood has entered the body, the native blood cells immediately attack it in a manner not unlike that of white blood cells targeting incompatible blood types. The foreign blood cells are destroyed, and presumably consumed, but it is not known how or why this occurs. It is known, however, that this form of consumption acts as a stimulant to the blood angel, and seems to temporarily stabilize their otherwise dangerous auras.

Reproductive type: Sexual. Their mating patterns and tendencies seem similar to humans, although this is based on a small sample of interviews and speculation.

Social structure: Blood angels are very rare, and have banded together in tight-knit tribes for survival. This is not because blood angels are in any way weak individually, but rather because the angel civilizations and their allies seem quite intent on the species' extinction. Blood angel tribes are extremely militaristic, with a strict chain of command based on combat ability and combat record. Warfare is considered to be the only profession available to a blood angel, and literally all other tasks that don't directly involve battle, whether that be forging weapons or hunting, are considered annoying but sadly necessary chores. Because of this, a fully trained blood angel warrior is usually completely self-sufficient, able to make his own armaments, find and cook his own food, and tend to his own injuries. As a society, however, this is desperately inefficient, and ensures that all blood angel goods, dwellings, and even their weapons are of ramshackle quality. Wealth is highly prized among blood angels for this reason, as they much prefer the products and services of other races, and are enthusiastic traders. One would also expect them to make excellent mercenaries as well, but except in the case of large-scale warfare in which an entire tribe might be hired at once, they are loathe to leave their tribes.

Combat analysis: Very high. This is based largely on rumors and stories, as there have never been any reports of human forces in Earth realm engaging blood angels, but based on those rumors and stories blood angels are savage and nigh-unstoppable. In addition to their formidable magical powers, there are many stories that depict blood angels suffering mortal injuries and still fighting on, and sometimes even surviving after emerging victorious. This is at least partly because of the blood angels' absorbing a foe's blood in combat, and the positive effects it seems to have on them. Besides that, it has been noted - and may I suggest that an investigation be launched as to HOW Beta Team found this out without butchering our specimen - that a blood angel seems to retain consciousness and even mobility when suffering dramatic blood loss or major organ failure. The mechanism that makes this possible is completely unknown, unless the aforementioned research team is holding out on us.

Misc. notes: The biggest mystery behind the blood angels is the dramatic emnity between them and true angel tribes, and the idea that they may not be true demons at all. Certainly they possess many of the same traits as demons, but their bodies don't seem nearly as resilient to magical energy, and they have startlingly civilized societies and behavioral patterns when out of combat, which is of course uncommon amongst demons. It seems obvious, given the biological similarities, that the blood angels are somehow related to true angels, although any explanation for how they are related is mired in uneducated guesses and unverifiable legends. As for the war between the angels and blood angels, it is curiously one-sided, both in terms of victories and efforts. As far as our research has pieced together, blood angels aren't in the habit of assaulting angel strongholds, and the true angels have waged war against their much rarer and darker kin to the point that the species is presumed effectively extinct; our one specimen, Selene, is unaware of any other living members of her race. It is unknown why such animosity exists among the true angels, although it seems as if they're not the only ones committing systematic genocide: many of the blood angel tribes' most recent losses can apparently be attributed to the Third Brotherhood, which began a campaign against the species more than two decades ago. It is, naturally, unknown to us why the cult suddenly targeted the blood angels, but it is known that they were enormously successful. It is doubtful we'll be finding another specimen to keep Selene company.

US Research Division Omega - Survey File D2301

Nexus II  
by Black Dragon (black_)  
.com/anime5/faniclair

All the characters in this story are mine! All MINE! MWA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

Chapter 18  
Roots of Madness  
**********************************************************************************

Ranma yawned mightily as he pushed himself up off his blanket, blinking lazily into the sun as it crested the bleak, barren horizon.

Scratching his arm, he promptly got up to wash before he recalled that he had no idea where to find fresh water.

That thought prompted him to recall where he was, and whose fault it was.

"I feel really bad thinking this, but I should listen to Rayden more often," the pigtailed warrior mumbled. "Well, nothing for it now."

Stepping past the cold remains of last night's camp fire, and deliberately ignoring the net of fish meat that wasn't fish meat, Ranma looked around the spot where they had made camp, his gaze moving past the still-sleeping forms of K and Kaze.

As was his usual practice when he woke up in the morning, his first act after washing (which wasn't an option at the moment) was to find Rayden. As the demonic paladin never slept, Ranma often worried about what kind of mischief a fairly psychotic dark warrior might get into if left to his own devices for eight hours or so. Thus far, Ranma hadn't found anything to be TOO concerned about: although the shrines formed from fresh, bloodless corpses and malevolent-looking statues and symbology were creepy enough, thus far there had been no indication of mass murder or rampant destruction on his watch.

There had been some when he had left the dark paladin with Kaze, but it really wasn't cause for concern. Besides, the lizard-skin cloak Rayden had made him was actually pretty cool.

Ranma ran a hand over the smooth, glossy cape he now wore over his shoulders fondly as he found his friend and subordinate kneeling in the dirt next to a rock outcropping, his hands busy scrawling something into the dirt.

"Well, haven't we been industrious lately," Ranma mused as he walked up behind the larger man. "So what's all this?"

Rayden, having long since grown used to Ranma's casually stealthy movement, turned around calmly as he realized who was behind him. "Oh, hey. You're awake."

Ranma could see that Rayden's sleeves had been rolled up, and that blood was leaking slowly from an obviously self-inflicted wound on his forearm. On anyone else, this would have warranted alarm, but for Rayden Ranma was content to patiently wait for an explanation.

"I've been messing with the living weapon all night," Rayden explained as he stepped back. Ranma could see that there were several rings drawn in blood on the ground, all of them interlocking each other and simultaneously encircling Gehenna, who was still in her inert sword form and stuck point-down into the dirt.

There was also a pile of suspiciously humanoid bones embellishing the ritual markings.

"Anyone I knew?" Ranma asked blithely.

"Just the elf," Rayden mumbled as he stood over the macabre assemby. "Figured there was no point in hunting down the materials when we already had a body."

"You didn't strip his flesh to make breakfast or anything, did you?" Ranma suddenly asked warily.

A vein popped up on Rayden's head. "No, I didn't. Are you STILL hung up on the merfolk? How was I supposed to know that you guys consider those overgrown tuna to be people?"

"If you DID know, would you have spared them?" Ranma asked.

"Well... not all of them. I've gotta eat, ya know."

Ranma grimaced. "Whatever. What can you tell me about that Gehenna thing?"

Rayden shrugged. "You know most of the facts already. Sentient weapon, demonic nature, devours souls... Though not the souls of whoever it's killing, which is different."

"It is?" Ranma asked as he leaned over to stare at the weapon. He wasn't that familiar with demonic weapons, despite having seen Darkrune in action several times.

"Yeah. Most demon weapons that are into souls go the economy route as far as spirits go, absorbing those of its victims." Rayden crossed his arms over his chest. "This one instead fuels itself with magic while building up the soul of its bearer with its power. Kind of like a farmer eating bread while fattening up livestock for slaughter. I'd guess the souls are 'tastier' that way or something."

"Great," deadpanned Ranma. "So what do we do with it? I'm not leaving it here for some clueless shmuck to find."

The Dread Knight shrugged. "I can break it, if you'd like."

Ranma considered it for a moment. 'I WAS just thinking about how I should let Rayden break things more often. His instincts on what to kill are usually pretty good.'

"Okay, yeah. Go for it," the pigtailed rogue said. He felt a little bad about killing the living blade, but reasoned that the deceitful, soul-sucking weapon was just a tool; it wasn't like he was really ending a life in this case.

As Rayden nodded and started drawing Darkrune, Ranma noticed that Gehenna was trembling in the ground.

"Hey, what's wrong with that thing?" He asked.

"Well, it can hear us, you know," Rayden said as he touched the tip of his greatsword against Gehenna's hilt and causing a crackling burst of red sparks. "It's probably just freaking out."

"It fears death?" Ranma asked, intrigued. Now that he thought about it, he recalled that Gehenna had shrunk away from Rayden before, right before he killed the elf.

"It's not a very good weapon, is it?" The demon said contemptuously as he raised Darkrune above his head.

"Wait, hold on," Ranma said suddenly, leaning in toward the intelligent weapon.

"Seriously? Again?" Rayden complained as he put down his sword. "You always regret these decisions, you know."

Ranma rolled his eyes as he circled Gehenna. "Why isn't it saying anything? It wouldn't shut up yesterday."

"It can't speak without a user. I guess it's part of the contract or something," Rayden said, shrugging. "The ritual circle there is actually supposed to feed it enough power to let it act on its own for a bit."

Ranma raised his head to regard the taller man. "Why would you set up something like that?"

"I was going to fight it. You know, in ritual combat," Rayden expained. "Maybe use its power to enchant a sword or something. You know, wizardy stuff. It's kind of a hobby of mine, like the cooking."

Ranma considered this for a minute before he stood up. "Okay, power up the circle. Let me talk to it," he ordered, "and be ready to kill it the moment I give the okay."

The ritual proved short and decidedly unglamorous. Smoky tendrils of darkness crept up from the spell circle and seeped into the weapon, occasionally prompting a burst of the black electric arcs that seemed to accompany all of the Dread Knight's magic.

The result, however, was profound. The moment that enough power flooded into Gehenna, she changed into her human form in a bright flare of light. Unike before, when Ranma and his lackeyes had assaulted her in her fairly pilfered mansion, her hair now looked unkempt and her eyes were panicked and wild as she glanced between the two men.

"Wh-What in the abyss were you planning to do to me?" She demanded angrily. The way she kept looking between Rayden and Ranma indicated clearly that she wasn't sure who to be more afraid of.

"We were going to kill you," Ranma admitted, somewhat perturbed by how much Gehenna resembled an ordinary, terrified human, "any particular reason we shouldn't?"

"I am the Kingslayer Gehenna!" The redhead shouted, her back going straight as she glared at Ranma. "Emperors and demon lords across the realms would give their entire fortunes for a taste of my power!"

"I'm the everything-slayer Rayden," the aforementioned demon deadpanned, "and right now I'm wondering what your power looks like while spilling out into a puddle on the ground."

"Now, now, let's have none of that," Ranma chided as the two demons glared coldly at each other. "You said you're called Gehenna, right? Why is something like you-"

"Do not refer to me as 'something' or 'it'," Gehenna snapped, interrupting the pigtailed man. "I am not a piece of cold, senseless iron like the blades up your sleeve. I am a living being, much as you."

"Not for long, if you don't watch your tone," Rayden warned.

"All right, fine, have it your way," Ranma allowed, shrugging. "So what is SOMEONE like you doing in a dead-end realm like this one, if you're a big deal?"

Gehenna frowned. "Trying to obtain some measure of peace for myself, actually, and escape my reputation."

"Well, congrats on a job well done," Rayden mocked. "I've never heard of ya."

Gehenna raised an eyebrow. "That may be so. I have heard of you, however: wielder of the bloodthirsting blade Darkrune, the feared Prince of War." With obvious reluctance and no small degree of fear, the living weapon inclined her head. "I'll never forget that sword. It is the badge of the avatar of the Third Brotherhood, devoted of Kharak."

Ranma was about to ask what all that meant when a pair of choked gasps came from behind him.

"Whoa, what? Avatar? Him?" K said, his small draconic face twisted into an expression of plain disbelief. "You have the wrong guy, babe."

"You should be more careful, Lady Gehenna," Kaze warned from where he stepped up while holding the metadragon, "the fanatics of the dark cults don't take blasphemy lightly, even if an innocent mistake."

"I see you're up early," Ranma deadpanned.

"As soon as we sensed a hot chick near the camp, we were wide awake," K explained shamelessly.

Gehenna looked upset as she glared at Kaze. "I blaspheme no one. This man IS the avatar. No other may wield the blade."

Kaze shook his head. "You are mistaken. Shikodan, I'm sure you can explain how you came across your weapon."

At this point, the men other than Rayden noticed that he looked distinctly uncomfortable, which was an odd expression for the dark paladin under any circumstances.

"Yeah... it's a little complicated," Rayden grumbled. "But anyway, this isn't about me! Answer Ranma's questions or I'll break you like a chopstick!" The demon snarled.

"Hold on a sec!" K shouted before Ranma could continue. "What do you mean 'it's complicated'? You're not actually the avatar, are you?"

Kaze took a step forward, slightly tense as he started to consider the possibility. "Shi-Shikodan, is she mistaken?" He asked, his voice cracking. "Back in Greken's territory... I made up that story about us representing our religions, but I never once actually imagined..."

"Hey, can we not talk about this now?" Rayden asked, scrubbing the back of his head. "We were in the middle of threatening the living sword!"

"Screw the sword, I'm friends with TWO avatars!" K said breathlessly. "Holy crap! I should be a bard! Our travels are gonna be SO epic!"

"It's true, then?" Kaze asked, his eyes wide with awe. "You're the Prince of War? The bloody call to oblivion? The crimson slayer?"

Ranma and Rayden winced badly as a distinctly unpleasant "Squee!" noise came from the party's cleric.

"I must have your account at once! I have to make a diagram of your cult's hierarchy! Oh, and a timeline of-"

_Thwack! Clang!_ Both Kaze and K fell face-first in the dirt as an annoyed Ranma smashed them in the back of the head.

"Now, if Ray would kindly stop Gehenna from sneaking off, we can get back to the topic at hand," the pigtailed man said irritably.

Rayden promptly seized Gehenna by her glowing red tresses as she tried to scramble into the trees, and then threw her painfully onto the ground between him and Ranma.

"But I just wanted to-" Kaze's protest was cut off as Ranma planted a foot onto the back of his head, plowing it back into the ground.

"So Gehenna the Kingslayer," Ranma said, rubbing his chin, "out of curiosity, were the kings you've slain your targets, or your wielders?"

Gehenna shrugged, obviously not making much of the question as she stood up. "A little of column A, a little of column B." She dusted herself off, throwing a nervous glance at Rayden.

"Fair enough. I just wanted to get a feel for where on the ethical chart you were," Ranma said as he lifted his foot up off his party cleric. "Not that all of us are models of responsible behavior." He mumbled as he stared down at the evon.

Gehenna looked confused. "I am a weapon. I kill those marked by my wielder as his enemies. Ethics are the domain of politicians and elders, not warriors and swords."

Ranma took a long moment to decide whether or not he liked that answer, and then spoke again. "All right, I'm going to go back to my first question: do you have any good reasons for us not to destroy you?"

Gehenna twitched. "You killed my servant and removed me from my home. And then you seek to pass judgment on ME?"

Her haughty expression faded when Rayden's hand gripped her shoulder tightly, practically surging with malevolent power.

"Funny how that works out, huh?" The demon said darkly. "If you're not strong enough to hold on to your life and property, what right do you have to complain when it's taken away?"

"I was under the impression that things worked differently on Earth realm," Gehenna said bitterly. "But you are correct."

"No, he's not," Ranma admitted with a sigh. "You are. We did screw up, didn't we?"

"I believe that primary responsibility must lie with Rakkyo, as the deliberate instigator of the conflict," Kaze noted as he dusted off his robes.

"Sure, but that doesn't change the fact that we were dumb enough to fall for it," Ranma insisted. "I was going to just break her when I thought she was just some evil weapon before, but..." He trailed off uncertainly.

"She IS just an evil weapon," Rayden insisted, "Well, maybe more apathetic than strictly 'evil'... But she IS a soul-sucker. That's reason enough to destroy her."

"That was before I was released from my contract," Gehenna insisted, "now I have tasted freedom, and I care little for the bloody existence of constant battle and pointless killing. I desire only to live as the humans do, to eat and play and create," she said wistfully as she pushed off Rayden's hand. "A life without purpose, but full of meaning! Is that too much to ask?"

Ranma and the others stared silently at the shapely redhead as her fierce, glowing eyes looked upon them defiantly.

"Nope, I guess it's not," Ranma admitted before he turned around. "Well, have a good life. We're heading east."

Gehenna blinked in shock, taken completely off guard. "What? But..."

"I hope there something that needs murdering that way," Rayden growled. "This 'not killing people' thing is starting to get on my nerves." He started off toward the camp, kicking a rock that was next to his path; it promptly shattered into dusty chunks.

"You're not murdering ANYONE until you tell me all about being an avatar," Kaze said, turning after the demon knight. "I can't believe you kept something like that from me!"

"WAIT!"

The party stopped and glanced back at Gehenna, who was sweating nervously as she leaned over the edge of the black circle on the ground.

"What now? You said you wanted to be left alone, so we're leaving you alone," Ranma said, clearly annoyed.

Gehenna looked distinctly embarrassed as she whispered "I need a wielder."

"Huh?" K mumbled. "Didn't you JUST say you were tired of being wielded and wanted freedom?"

Gehenna gulped. "I... I do! Truly I do! But... I can't function without a master!" She cried, collapsing into a sitting position and staring down at her lap.

The pose looked incredibly sad and pathetic, and Ranma fought off half a dozen male instincts urging him to run to the redhead's side and comfort her.

After reaching out and yanking Kaze back by his hair as the priest ran to the redhead's side to comfort her, Ranma massaged his forehead with his hand. "Look, if you need one of us to use you, you're outta luck. I'm not letting you take anyone's soul."

"I don't need your soul!" Gehenna claimed. "I just need your magic power!"

"Why should we give you that?" Rayden demanded, sneering.

"You can't just leave me here to rust! That's cruel!"

"Oh, for the love of..." Ranma groaned as the sentient weapon sat on the ground sniffling, and then he waved his companions in toward him.

"All right guys, huddle up," Ranma said as Kaze and Rayden flanked him, lowering their heads to listen to their leader. K landed on Ranma's head and stretched his neck in as well.

"So what are we looking at, here? How can we make this problem disappear?"

As Rayden opened his mouth, Ranma added, "WITHOUT murder."

"Well if you take away all the best tools, don't be surprised that you can't build a house," Rayden grumbled.

"Actually, I support Shikodan's viewpoint on this matter," Kaze said, surprising Ranma, "it would be safest, fastest, and relatively merciful to simply destroy her. A weapon that does not wish to fight, yet needs a wielder, is little more than a dangerous parasite."

"Wait, weren't you the one running up to help her just a second ago?" Ranma demanded.

Kaze gently rubbed his head where his long, glimmering hair had nearly been yanked out of his skull. "Yes, well... I'm far more rational when I don't have to actually look at her. She's quite lovely for a demonic weapon, is she not?"

"So that's two votes for the nuclear option, huh?" Ranma mumbled before tilting his head up slightly. "And what about you?"

K was silent for several seconds. "I say take her with us."

"You CAN'T be serious," Rayden groaned. "Would you try thinking with something besides your-"

"That's not why!" K snapped, interrupting the Dread Knight. "Think about it: she's a magical creature who operates on a spiritual contract, right? Contracts can be negotiated! Even magic ones!"

The metadragon grinned. "Right now we have every advantage: she can't leave without us, she's desperate to leave her usual existence of killing all the time, and she's TERRIFIED of Rayden. If we renegotiate her spirit contract, we can get her to work for us without offering up anybody's soul!"

Ranma felt a bit queasy at the thought. Not just at taking advantage of someone who was pretty much at their mercy and might not deserve it, but also at the idea of having to put up with another weirdo going forward. "Koz? Would that actually work?"

The evon nodded slowly. "There's nothing wrong with the principle... and we can always fall back on termination as plan B."

Gehenna watched curiously as the group mumbled to each other just outside of earshot, and squirmed impatiently while she waited for a judgment to be reached.

This was an unusual situation for her, to be sure. As a powerful weapon in one form and a devastatingly attractive woman in the other, she usually had adventurers scrambling to possess her, no matter the eventual cost to themselves. Of course, none of those men and women had been an avatar or traveled around with one as some kind of hired goon, but Gehenna still felt she was being severely undervalued.

The living weapon shuddered as she again locked her eyes on the greatsword at Rayden's back. She wondered if it was gazing back, hungering silently for her the way she hungered for most magic weapons.

"Why are we even discussing this? She tried to kill Ranma!" Rayden suddenly shouted, his voice easily projecting out of the huddle.

"That didn't stop us from taking YOU," K pointed out.

"That was different!" Rayden protested. "You just want to let her live because she has boobs!"

Ranma raised a hand up suddenly, and the demon paladin relectantly fell silent.

Ranma turned away from his comrades and silently approached Gehenna, his arms crossed over his chest.

"So... Gehenna. We have an idea of what to do with you."

"Then you're taking me with you?" She asked hopefully.

"Well, do we really have to?" Ranma asked. "Is there any way to give you a little magical jolt and just have you wander off by yourself?"

"That WOULD be possible, actually," the redhead mumbled as she glared at Rayden, "if someone hadn't deprived me of a soul that belonged to me fairly. I can subsist on such a bounty for some time, but right now the magic from this crude ritual barely grants me enough energy to speak, and I expect it to peter out in minutes."

Rayden stuck his tongue out at her while Ranma sighed.

"Yeah, I figured that. Not that we're going to apologize. So what we've decided on is to have a look at this demonic contract you want us to join in."

Gehenna blinked, and then she spoke.

It was not in the fierce, slightly sultry tone she used normally, but rather a thunderous booming noise that filled the air.

"The pact demands sacrifice," Gehenna's voice was a rumbling snarl that caused Kaze to jump back and K to cover his head with his wings. "Blood spilled demands blood shed. For the gift of-"

_Thonk!_ Gehenna was silenced as Rayden suddenly clubbed her over the head with his fist.

"Knock it off, dimwit," the other demon growled. "Give it to us in English, not Dark Prophecy."

"Fine. Ruin the whole bit, why don't you?" Gehenna grumbled as she rubbed her head before speaking again, but this time in a bored monotone. "The wielder - that refers to whomever makes this pact with me, presumably Ranma - takes the demon weapon Gehenna - that's me, of course - as his or her charge, and is thereby obligated to abide by the following responsibilities: the constant maintenance of a sustainable quantity of magical power, to be transmitted at a constant rate from within a radius of six kilometers. The upkeep of said weapon's biological necessities while maintaining human form. The defense of said weapon from other weapons that may cause her explosive and catastrophic organ failure and/or breakage, most notably Darkrune."

Rayden grinned and straightened pridefully as Gehenna shot him a wary glance, no doubt pleased by the fear he had inspired.

"In return for abiding by said weapon's wishes to lead a life free of constant battle and having conflict forced upon her for so long as this pact is in effect, the final obligation, that of surrendering your soul to said weapon upon your death for her personal consumption, shall be waived." Gehenna sighed as she finished. "Any questions?"

The adventurers' expressions ranged from disbelief to anger.

"Wait, that's IT?" K asked, sound indignant. "What do you give us in return for feeding, caring for, and protecting you?"

"Maybe she'll give us unwanted criticism and snarky comments. That's the deal that you worked out," Ranma deadpanned, causing K to wince in embarrassment.

"It does seem an awful lot of trouble, particularly the part about preventing Shikodan from killing you," Kaze explained as he shook his head.

"Can I break her now?" Said dark paladin asked as he started cracking his knuckles.

"See? It's a far greater chore than you probably imagined."

Gehenna planted her hands on her curvaceous hips, refusing to be cowed so easily. "It is your group that is in the wrong from getting me ejected from my home, killing my previous wielder, and then even depriving me of the spirit he had willingly bequeathed unto me! And I should point out that he had no problem taking similar terms when he agreed to wield me."

"Yeah, well I don't think he was imagining fencing practice when he thought of all the 'swordplay' he was going to use you for," K mumbled.

"Okay, so here's how this is going to work," Ranma began. "You're going to make your pact with Rayden."

Gehenna blanched. "The avatar? Why?"

"Well, he's really the only suitable one, when you think about it," Ranma explained, approaching the redhead. "Neither Kaze or K are weapons-users, and you'd just manipulate them whenever you wanted. Ray has magic power to spare, he seems to hate your guts, and I'm pretty sure it's impossible for you to eat his soul even if you trick him."

"But wait! What about you?" Gehenna demanded. "I'll do the pact with you instead!"

"I doubt that," Ranma deadpanned as he reached out and took the demon weapon's hand. He smirked as Gehenna gasped in shock. "You might not have noticed earlier, in the mansion, but..."

"You have no magical power... Not even a drop," Gehenna mumbled, her voice equal parts wonder and horror. "How is this possible? Even the normal flow of magical power should... But you can't even..."

Ranma shrugged. "Yeah, it's a little weird. Anyway, if we're gonna do this you'll be leeching Ray's magic for the forseeable future."

"I already have Darkrune, though," the demonic warrior noted. "I mean, I guess I can dual-wield 'em, but I'd be much better with just my sword."

"Don't worry about it," Ranma said, smiling as he turned his head. "She'll be my weapon, not yours."

Kaze raised an eyebrow. "So... Shikodan takes on the maintenance and risk of bonding with a demonic tool... and you actually use the tool for your own benefit?"

Ranma nodded. "That sounds about right." Then he glanced at Rayden. "That okay with you?"

Rayden hesitated, frowning. "Can I kick her whenever I feel like it?"

"NO," Ranma said firmly. "You can only kick her when she's being legitimately annoying."

"You're the boss," said the dark paladin, turning toward Gehenna. "All right, let's do this."

"I object!" The demonic tool in question shouted. "This one is COMPLETELY unsuitable as a master!"

"Right, that reminds me," Ranma said, snapping his fingers, "if we're going to do all that crap you said we had to do, then you're going to have to work for us, too. Meaning you're going to have to get used to being a weapon again, at least some of the time."

The redheaded demoness clenched her teeth. "And why should I, the aggrieved party, have to agree to such terms?"

"Two reasons," Ranma said simply. "One, while it's true that you got a raw deal when Rakkyo tricked us, you ALSO ate my sword." The pigtailed man glared as he crossed his arms over his chest. "So right now I have NO magic weapons, and it's YOUR fault."

Gehenna scoffed. "You should be thanking me for ridding you of that eyesore. No self-respecting warrior would use such a thing."

A vein popped up on Ranma's head as he continued. "That brings me to the second reason: Rayden would really rather break you here and now, and I'm trying my hardest to come up with reasons to stop him," the pigtailed man growled, "it'd help a lot if you were less of a pain."

Gehenna turned to stare pensively at the Dread Knight, who in turn stared back expectantly. "I don't like the idea of forming a contract with the man the killed my last master and then cheated me out of his soul."

"You have a valid point," Ranma admitted. "On the other hand, you don't have a lot of options, here. Either take it or we'll shatter you so you can't run around draining other people's souls."

"Tch!" Gehenna clicked her tongue irritably as she approached the other demon. "I truly do have no choice, then. Very well. I shall submit to this indignity for now. However, don't be surprised if I find a far more suitable master in short order."

"So long as you're not surprised when we fail to give a damn," Ranma agreed. "Now hurry up and do your magic mumbo-jumbo so Ray can make breakfast; I'm not going to give up my meal for this nonsense."

Gehenna hesitated a long while before finally and reluctantly placing a hand against Rayden's chest. "I assume you're familiar with this sort of pact?"

"Yeah, I know how this goes. Not the first time I've offered up a chunk of myself to some freak in exchange for power."

After clearing his throat, the dark paladin spoke again. "I, Rayden Shikodan, first among the Dread Knights and chosen of Kharak, do swear by the pact of the demon blade Gehenna, and bind myself to the contract of souls. Insofar as this contract WON'T actually take my soul, anyway. Serve me, Gehenna, and I shall serve in turn as a master does."

"Wow. Ray wasn't kidding when he said he knew this thing," K murmured.

Kaze raised an eyebrow. "Is it just me, or does this pact somewhat resemble a... marriage ceremony?"

Ranma shuddered. "REAL glad I don't have to do this with her."

Gehenna nodded as the two demons continued their ceremony, ignoring the spectators. "Rayden, I accept your patronage and offer you my subservience... where srtictly necessary. Henceforth I shall call you - er, wait, I suppose that would be Ranma, actually - Master, and reap a bloody tally in his name. Henceforth, until such a time as your wasted bones lie bare in the sunlight, broken, twisted and frozen in a grim pantomime of your painful, agonized demise, I am in your care."

Rayden frowned. "That part about the bones isn't supposed to be there."

"It's simply my creative take on what your death will hopefully be like," Gehenna said through a happy smile.

"Wow, it IS like they're married," K murmured.

Rayden shrugged off the verbal hostility of the other demon, and then took her by the shoulders. "It is done. Let the pact be sealed."

And then, to the utter shock of the spectators, the two demons kissed.

It wasn't a long or passionate contact, nor did it seem like either of them enjoyed it, but still the sight of the pair locking lips so soon after affirming that they each wanted the other dead caught the others competely flat-footed.

Rayden broke the kiss first, and then sighed as he turned away from Gehenna. "Well, glad THAT'S over with. Who wants breakfast?"

Shocked silence greeted his question. "What? You guys aren't hungry?"

Gehenna cocked her head to one side. "YOU can cook? How amusing," the redhead murmured, sidling up next to the swordsman.

Ranma was the first to shake off his surprise in favor of sating his hunger. "Right! Breakfast! Right..." He started to walk off, looking uncomfortable. "I'll go find some edible plants to go with the rations."

"Thanks!" Rayden said obliviously as he started to rummage through their supplies mounted on the back of the hover bike. Gehenna glanced between the two men, and then slinked off in the direction Ranma went.

Just as Rayden was withdrawing some salted meats, he noticed that K and Kaze were standing right behind him, staring intently.

"So... how was it?" K asked when the Dread Knight gave him a questioning look.

Rayden frowned. "Eh, not too bad, actually. There was a little bit of an energy drain at first, like that feeling when you fire off a really big spell, but after-"

"No, no, we were referring to the kiss," Kaze said quickly.

Rayden's expression darkened. "Really? I just completed an ancient ritual binding my fate to that of a soul-devouring demon sword, and your question is about the kiss?"

"You know, you could have given a full answer in the time it took you to state the obvious like that," K pointed out.

The Dread Knight rolled his eyes. "Fine. To answer your question, I've had better," he said blithely as he started unwrapping the food.

The two lecherous scholars recoiled at the response, each one pale with shock.

"Y-Y-YOU'VE had better? As in better k-kisses?" K stuttered.

"So... many... questions!" Kaze said, clutching his head as if in pain.

"Well, keep 'em to yourself," Rayden said as he took out a carving knife and a water jug, "I'm in this group strictly for the purposes of taking and causing damage, not swapping gossip."

Kaze stepped up next to Rayden. "Gossip? But your rank in the Third Brotherhood is no mere gossip! Why didn't you tell us that you were an avatar?"

"It's not THAT important," the demon grumbled.

"Of course it is!" K shouted, landing on Rayden's head and curling his neck to stare upside-down into the swordsman's eyes. "There's only one of you, right? You're like the boss of the whole cult!"

"Not really, no," Rayden said sharply, swatting the metadragon off of his head. The tiny beast yelped but righted himself in the air, swooping around to land onto the flat cargo section of the hover bike where Rayden was trying to cook.

"Really? Fascinating. Tell us more," Kaze asked, steepling his fingers.

Rayden growled as he started cutting the meat. "Look, is this really necessary? Why do you even care?"

Kaze took a step back, gesturing to himself grandly. "Why do I care? Because I aim to be a hero of justice, Shikodan!"

"You've got a bloody long ways to go," K said bluntly.

"Indeed I do!" Kaze agreed. "And one field I wish to specialize in is the recognition of demons as productive and useful members of society!"

"So you want to specialize in lying?" Rayden asked sarcastically. "Demons are killers and marauders. There are exceptions, but they're just that: exceptions."

"I'm not convinced that's true," Kaze said firmly, resting on his staff as he leaned forward. "I have seen demons willing to sell their lives for ideals and individuals rather than personal gain, and seen others act as law-abiding as any elf when constrained by civilization. Demons are generally rather intelligent; surely it can't be that hard to teach them the benefits of law and order."

The evon looked off into the distance, as if in deep contemplation. "Before one can affect change of any significance, one must have understanding. I did not set out to learn the ways of the demon and bring them enlightenment, and I certainly don't know if it's within my abilities, but I wish to try."

He turned around again and pounded his chest. "That is now my mission! I wish to learn all about you and your upbringing in order to further my understanding of the demonic elite which rule your savage settlements."

Rayden snorted as he finished with the meat. "Well, then you're wasting your time. I'm not one of the elite."

K snorted right back. "Don't give us that! You're a freaking avatar!"

Rayden said nothing as he started building a pit for a fire. "It's not like that," the demon knight finally mumbled. "I'm a fallen avatar."

"A what now?" K asked, edging closer.

"A fallen avatar. Or false avatar, or disgraced avatar, or whatever. I was chosen by the blade Darkrune to be the next Prince of War, but I wasn't strong enough. I failed again and again to prove myself as a Dread Knight, and eventually the others cast me out until I become worthy."

Kaze and K seemed rather taken aback by the explanation; not so much because Rayden was exiled, for they could easily imagine the belligerent demon getting into ill-advised fights, but rather because he was exiled for being weak.

"Yeesh, seriously? What kind of freaks do they have that can look down on YOU?" K asked.

"All kinds," Rayden said seriously. "So now you know the story: I'm a failure of an avatar who's lost any right to the title besides having this sword."

"No, we do not know the story," Kaze objected, slamming his hands onto the table. "We know the ending. I wish to know more! How were you inducted into the cult? How did you come across Darkrune? In what way did you fail your obligations?" The priest seemed more and more excited as he listed his queries, to which Rayden seemed to get more and more annoyed.

"All right, all right, FINE," Rayden groused. "Let me tell you the short version, at least." He started rummaging through the supplies again to find a cooking tin. "So, first off, let me tell you about my mother, High Priestess Tellana... and how she bought me AND Darkrune from this guy named Doppler Thaeramon..."

* * *

"Something the matter?"

Ranma glanced behind hims to where Gehenna stood, her arms crossed under her breasts and a curious expression on her face.

"No, not really," Ranma mumbled as he gathered some sort of wrinkled green fruits that had fallen from a tree.

"You looked slightly upset at the end of the ritual. Surely you're not feeling jealous already?" The redhead quipped.

"No, I think that's just when it really hit me that we're actually going to have to put up with you from now on," Ranma replied with a sigh. "I was really expecting the whole magic dealie to fail and for Ray to break you on the spot."

A vein popped up on Gehenna's head. "You do not seem pleased by my company."

"Nothing personal," Ranma mumbled as he finished packing away the greens into his inexplicably voluminous pockets, "but picking up a greedy demon who happens to eat useful items wasn't what I had in mind when I imagined topping off the team. It's like you're a combination of all our group's worst traits."

Ignoring Gehenna's mounting indignation, Ranma sighed again. "Plus you're a woman, which doesn't bother me, but it means that Kaze and K are going to be hounding you while Ray will probably be looking for reasons to get rid of you."

He glanced back at the demonic weapon. "Actually, I don't suppose you have a different human form available and only used that one to trick Rakkyo, do you?"

"NO, I do NOT," Gehenna snapped. "This is my true form, the base from which I become the weapon sought by my wielder! I have no other body save the forms of the weapons I consume."

Ranma filed that tidbit away for later as he shrugged. "Worth a shot. So why'd you follow me, anyway? Not much to do here."

"It was... abrupt and rather coercive, but our pact is legitimate and our bond has been forged," Gehenna admitted, walking past Ranma as she looked the human over. "We're going to be together for some time, so I thought we should get to know each other better."

'Great, she's the talkative sort,' Ranma grumbled in his head. He had gotten that impression before, but having her here with him, alone, drove the point home.

"I don't see why you'd want to know more about ME," Ranma mumbled as he searched some bushes looking for edible roots, "isn't Rayden your pact master or something?"

"Rayden is an incompetent thug," Gehenna snapped. "I can't fathom why I should have to be tethered to that one. Really, he's little better than a common beast!"

"Well, considering that our other options were the pervert or the UNcommon beast, you got off lucky. Besides, Rayden isn't half as scary as he acts."

"He's the blooming AVATAR of the ancient of destruction," Gehenna deadpanned.

"Yeah, about that," Ranma mumbled as he started digging, "I'm not so sure that's true. Rayden seems pretty... clumsy for an avatar. Maybe he's new or something, but in any case you're making way too much of it."

He dug out some plump-looking roots and then stood up before wiping off the knees of his pants. "Besides, I've fought Rayden. If all the talk about how powerful the Third Brotherhood is has any truth to it, Ray's WAY too weak to be any kind of big shot."

Gehenna was silent for several seconds after that, observing her master carefully.

It was difficult not to wonder what kind of power Ranma possessed to dismiss the Dread Knight's strength so easily. To say nothing of the way that the human so casually bossed the larger warrior around.

'He's strong, certainly. Stronger than Diegon,' the demonic weapon thought. 'But he and his lackeys seem to regard me as an annoyance that's been forced onto them, rather than an ally. That will have to change.'

"Hey, can I ask you a question?" Ranma asked suddenly, drawing Gehenna's attention.

"Certainly. I am at your beck and call," the redhead replied with a smirk.

"That... ritual you did with Ray..." The pigtailed man started, uncertain of how to continue. "Well... Koz said it reminded him of a marriage ceremony. And it did kind of look like one, especially with the kiss at the end. So, uh... Is there some connection?"

Gehenna snorted as she clasped her hands behind her back. "Perhaps. Although I've never actually seen a 'wedding,' my understanding is that such pacts have only been around for ten thousand years or so among human societies. The demonic pact's history stretches back much farther, so if one is derived from the other, it would be the wedding ceremony that came from the pact."

"So... The concept of marriage came from ancient ritual for tethering someone to a demon that would eventually get him killed and devour his soul?" Ranma asked, scratching his chin.

"And with considerable penalty and hardship if the pact were ever broken," Gehenna agreed.

Ranma shook his head as he dashed forward, running up the side of a tree and bouncing up atop a thick branch. "There's another thing that's been bothering me..."

"And what would that be?" Gehenna asked. "The pact was actually rather-"

"Not about the pact. About this place," Ranma mumbled as he scanned the horizon. Dead, leafless trees seemed to stretch out in every direction, creating a bleak gray canopy over the empty wasteland and scattered brush. "Why did Rakkyo send us here?"

Gehenna looked confused. "Because he didn't want us where we were? What makes you think he put any thought into it?"

"Teleporting people isn't a little thing, right? You don't just zap somebody away to some random location," the pigtailed man mused. "Even if he didn't care where we ended up, he had this place set up as a destination, right?"

Gehenna looked uncertain. "Probably... I'm not terribly familiar with the particulars of spellcraft."

"So if we can assume that this place actually has some significance to the old bastard, it makes me wonder if there's something important here."

Ranma jumped down from the tree, grimacing. "But more importantly than that, I'm pretty sure we're being watched."

"Watched?" Gehenna glanced about uncertainly. "I can't claim to have any notable skills of perception, but I don't see anyone other than us."

Ranma frowned as he walked around a large rock outcropping, his eyes scanning the horizon repeatedly. "When I was in China, I came up against these weird invisible zombies. They could stalk their targets for a good amount of time before they attacked."

Ranma spent several more seconds searching the empty wasteland before he turned around. "Then again, I could sense them, so it's probably this thing, here." he grumbled.

Then he kicked the rock pile next to him.

Gehenna's eyes widened as one of the massive, oblong boulders immediately shifted up, as if flinching back from the impact. "What is it? An elemental?"

Ranma frowned, noticing that the rocks didn't respond any further to his attack. "Dunno. Let's find out."

Ranma snapped his wrist to the side, and a small metal cylinder slipped out into his hand.

"What's that thing? Some sort of magic item?" Gehenna asked, moving closer to her master while keeping an eye on the rock pile.

"I guess it's what you clueless demons would call 'steel magic'. I'm not limited to using swords and stuff," Ranma explained condescendingly as he tossed the cylinder into the air and then caught it. "Specifically, this is a concussion grenade. Now we-"

_TWANG!_ Ranma jerked his arm out of the way as a shard of stone struck the grenade in his hand, sending it flying behind him and almost cutting open his bicep in the process.

The pigtailed man leapt back as Gehenna did the same, their eyes locked on the suspicious rock pile.

"Well, it's a lot more livey than it looks, isn't it?" Ranma quipped. "All right, we know you're alive, so come on up! I've got more explosives where that came from!"

A rumbling groan came from the outcropping as the boulders began to shift, and then a booming, surprisingly eloquent voice spoke up.

"And why, precisely, do I have top suffer this indignity?" Said the boulder pile with a distinctly British accent as it slowly rearranged itself in front of them. The largest boulders became four bulky, single-jointed legs that supported a base and torso made up of smaller stones haphazardly mashed together. The torso built up to a triangular plane, and three bulky arms floated next to each corner, tethered by a mysterious and evidently invisible energy. Each arm ended in a blocky fist formed from a loose collection of smaller pebbles that constantly swirled and shifted, as if trying to maintain its shape while fighting reason itself.

Its head was a single, mishappen piece of obsidian, notably different from the other stones, and had a single large ruby sunken into it, which Ranma guessed served as an eye.

"I'm asking seriously, now," the golem said as it rose up to it's full height, at nearly twenty-five feet. "I was just laying there. Not bothering anybody! And then some slanty-eyed wanker comes along and starts kickin' things and tossing explosives around! Who do you think you are?"

Ranma and Gehenna stared upward for quite some time, utterly silent.

"That's... That's a golem, right?" Gehenna asked uncertainly.

"Pretty sure," Ranma mumbled as he scratched his head.

"You could ask me, you know," the golem said bitterly. "I'm right here! I speak the queen's English! Bloody hell, you could NOT be more rude!"

"I've never heard of a chatty golem before," Ranma admitted. "Maybe it's actually some kind of elemental demon?"

"Oi! What did you call me?" The golem snapped as it raised the arm facing Ranma and Gehenna. It immediately crumbled and reformed in the air, creating a long gun barrel that it pointed right at Ranma's face. "Say 'at again! Say it! I dare you!"

The pigtailed man said nothing for several seconds, staring up into the golem's eye.

Then he finally turned toward Gehenna again. "Well, we should probably get this stuff back to Ray."

"Yes," Gehenna agreed solemnly, turning her gaze away from the massive stone construct, "I'm rather hungry as well."

"Wait, so let me get this straight," Ranma said as he started walking away, "you consume magical power, magical weapons, souls, AND food? Isn't that a bit much to fuel one person?"

Gehenna shrugged. "I am hardly responsible for the peculiar nature of my metabolism, it's just-"

"STOP IGNORING ME!" Screamed a booming voice from above before a huge, boulder-like leg slammed into the ground between the two.

Gehenna and Ranma both jumped back away from the impact, and ended up bouncing directly into the golem's hands before it closed its fists tightly around each of them.

"Ah HA! Gotcha now, you wily little-" the golem stopped speaking abruptly as Ranma twisted within its grip, slipping through its fingers before dropping down and landing on its leg.

"Oh. Well... I've still got your lady, so don't even try-"

Once again, the golem fell silent, and it felt the mass within its fist vanish before a tiny dagger fell through its fingers and dropped onto the ground.

"Oi, oi... You aren't any ordinary wankers, are ye?" The golem mumbled as he opened his hand, finding no sign of Gehenna.

"Well, you don't seem to be any ordinary golem," Ranma countered. "What are you supposed to be?"

"My NAME is Jeremiah," the golem growled, two of its arms swiveling about to encircle the martial artist.

"Don't be ridiculous," said Gehenna's voice, sounding particularly snide. "A mere doll like yourself has no need for a name."

"Says the talking dagger named Gehenna," Ranma snapped back, pre-empting Jeremiah.

"Whot? Dagger?" The golem asked, backing up as its single eye scanned the ground. "Oi, there it is! Blimey, is that really her?"

"Yeah, it is. Don't worry, you can ignore her," Ranma said. "So. Jerry. What is-"

"The name's JEREMIAH," the golem boomed. "Call me 'Jerry' again, and I'll be calling you 'Spot', if you catch my drift."

Ranma considered this as he scratched his shoulder. "Well, I don't really mind, but I have this thing I do where I change people's names to whatever I feel like to show how much I look down on them. You really feel like one of those kinds of characters."

"Oh, really?" Jeremiah said dangerously. "You're a mite short to be looking DOWN on me, lad."

Ranma's lips quirked into a smile. "Well, we can fix that."

And then he jabbed a finger down into Jeremiah's leg. "Bakusai tenketsu."

_BWOOM!_

Jeremiah yelped as one of its four legs suddenly exploded, and staggered to one side as it tried to keep its balance.

Ranma fell to the ground throught the shower of bursting rock, holding his cloak against the shrapnel.

"Ha! I knew that breaking point would be handy!" The martial artist crowed as he leapt to the side, dodging a leg that tried to smash him into a paste.

Ranma snapped up Gehenna from off the ground, and then tucked into a roll as one of Jeremiah's hands reached down to grab him.

"Too slow, Jerry!" Ranma yelled as he leapt away from the stone fingers, landing out of the golem's reach.

"The name..." The golem mumbled furiously as one of its arms shifted into the long gun barrel from before, "IS JEREMIAH!"

_BLAM!_ Ranma was, of course, expecting the gun barrel to do something gun-like, and it didn't disappoint as a huge shotgun-blast spread of rock shards tore through the air toward him.

Even though he was already moving, Ranma still caught the edge of the blast, and the wanderer grunted as several stone shards cut through his arm and shoulder guard and scored cuts over his side.

_Thunk!_ A large, cylinder-shaped chunk of granite popped out of the back of Jeremiah's weapon as the golem barked out a laugh.

"Ha! Not so cocky now, are ye?" Jeremiah taunted, though Ranma noted that it seemed to be wobbling unsteadily as it tried to keep its balance on three legs.

"Hmph! I've had about enough of this clown!" Gehenna said from within Ranma's grip. "Let's finish him off!"

"No, I don't think so..." Ranma mumbled. Then he shouted up at the golem. "Okay, okay! You got to show us your neat giant rock shotgun! You happy now?"

"It IS neat, innit?" Jeremiah said happily, holding up the gun-arm. "But seriously now, you detonated one of my legs."

"Aw, don't be like that, Jerry!" Ranma said, an insufferable grin on his face. "We were just fooling around, right Jerry? You shoot at me, I dismember you, it's all in good fun, eh JERRY?"

The golem had no face as such, and therefore no way of expressing the incandescent rage it was feeling beyond simple speech and body language.

In making a decision between the two, Jeremiah chose body language. And all concerned could agree that the three huge gun barrels being leveled at Ranma made its displeasure abundantly clear.

"It's been a pleasure, lad... Is what I would say if I wasn't programmed to never lie," Jeremiah spat. "But since I am, I must say that I'm just sorry that you're going to die quick."

This time Ranma swung the cape over himself, hiding his body before the trio of cannon blasts gouged a ragged hole in the earth. Jeremiah laughed as it watched the cloak get smashed into the ground; even though its shots hadn't penetrated the accessory - naturally it was enchanted somehow, they always were - the force behind the shots were enough to turn even obnoxiously tough humanoids into mulch.

"Oi, you still alive?" Jeremiah asked as three stone shot casings were ejected behind it.

_Thunk!_ "Ow! Careful where you toss those things!" Ranma said as he rubbed his head, frowning at the casing that had just fallen on him.

"Oh, sorry guv'na," Jeremiah said as it glanced back behind it. "Didn't see you... there..."

The golem trailed off as Ranma walked up behind it and calmly grabbed one of it's remaining legs.

"Bakusai tenketsu," Ranma said blandly as he flexed his fingers experimentally, "again."

_BWOOM!_ Jeremiah yelped as another of its legs vanished into a cloud of shrapnel, and it windmilled its massive arms uselessly in an attempt to stay upright as gravity relentlessly pulled it backward.

"No no no no nonononoNOOOOO!" _Thwud!_

Ranma smirked at the stone construct, and then leapt onto the golem's base before rebounding off onto an arm and walking up its length onto a shoulder.

"Well, did Jerry learn his lesson?" Ranma asked as the dagger in his hand glowed brightly and shifted into a heavy maul.

Jeremiah grunted bitterly. "My name is Jerem-"

The golem stuttered in a panic as Ranma raised the maul into the air.

"Jerry! I'm Jerry! Nice to meet you!" Jerry said desperately. "Sorry about the violence! Didn't mean it! Honest!"

As Ranma lowered Gehenna, he heard a snort come from the demon weapon. "A golem that knows fear? What an absurd concept."

"Yeah, really. Who makes weapons with a sense of self-preservation?" Ranma deadpanned as he tossed the maul down onto the ground. Gehenna shifted back to her human shape before landing lightly on the ground and sticking her tongue out at her master.

"Whatever. You beat me. Blew half me bloody legs off. You happy now? Can you leave me in peace?" Jerry asked irritably.

"No. First tell me who built you, why, and where we can find he or she," Ranma demanded.

"Interrogatin' the construct, are we? Bloody brilliant," Jerry grumbled. "Very well then, if you want to interrogate me, you must answer a riddle."

Gehenna clicked her tongue. "Really, now? We already have you at our mercy, why should we let you make demands?" She asked.

A vein popped up on Ranma's head. "Gehenna, are you familiar with the word 'irony' at all?" He snapped. Then he turned back to the golem. "All right, fine. Lay it on me."

Jerry made a noise that simulated it clearing its throat, and then spoke. "What sounds like a duck, looks like a duck, and swims like a duck?"

Ranma was dead silent for nearly five seconds before he asked back. "Wait... it's not a duck, righ-"

"Duck is correct!" Jerry said, clapping two of its massive hands together. "You've solved Jerry's riddle! I may now answer any and all questions you have."

"Okay, first question: what kind of stupid riddle was that?" Ranma snapped.

"Hey, I don't make the rules, I just enforce them with an obsidian fist," Jerry explained.

"Fine, then who DOES make the rules?" Ranma asked.

"Same guy who made me, of course. Lord Genex Karl," Jerry said, its voice rich with pride. "I'm a master golem of the golem master, as it were. Heh heh."

Ranma glanced down over the edge of the golem's body. "Gehenna, that ring any bells?"

"Not at all, though I'm hardly the one to ask," the demon weapon admitted. "We should question the others back at camp."

"Blimey, there're more of you wankers?" Jerry groaned.

"Yeah, and they're WAY more annoying than me, so you'd better answer as best you can," Ranma warned. "Why are you out here? What's your job?"

"I'm a sentry. I sit out here in hidin', and then jump on folk that I think might start a tussle," Jerry explained. "Funny thing is, you lot looked pretty safe to me... until you attacked me and blew off me legs."

"Yeah, that is funny," Ranma said, chuckling lightly. "So when you engage an attacker, you just fight 'em off yourself, or do you have any buddies out here?"

"Nothin' besides the jakku. Nasty little beasties. Whenever me cannon fires, they always swarm the area and drag off the bits of intruder."

Gehenna raised an eyebrow. "What are these 'jakku'? I've never heard of such creatures."

"Undead, lass, and not the slow, stumbly kind, either!" Jerry warned. "They're fast, and armed with necroblades! What's more - and really, this is the important part - they're completely invisible!"

"Aw, crap," Ranma said suddenly, massaging his head. "Those are the freaks I ran into in China that I was talking about. Not too tough, but tricky bastards."

"Well, if you don't care for them, you'd best leg it, because usually they would have arrived by now," the golem said, its single eye moving back and forth. "Actually... where the hell are they? Their response time has never been THIS bad."

Gehenna shrugged. "Maybe they ran into trouble along the way."

Ranma looked skeptical. "Trouble? Out here? There's nothing around for miles."

Then he frowned. "Well, nothing except for our camp."

Ranma was silent for several seconds as Gehenna stared at him expectantly.

"Uh oh..."

* * *

"And that's most of the story. Most of that angel tribe is gone. Maybe all of it. I never bothered to look for any survivors," Rayden explained as he slathered a marinade over some chunks of meat roasting over a fire. "After that I was taken back into the cult, but I still failed all my trials, so the ecclesiarchy got tired of looking after me and Mom got tired of my constantly disappointing her. I was booted out and told not to return to the cathedral until I was strong enough to be a proper avatar. Soon after that, I get my ass kicked by some teenage kid facing off against dragons, and here I am."

Sitting behind him, their bodies stiff and their expressions dark, sat Kaze and K, the latter having returned to human form.

Neither said anything immediately, each of them completely overwhelmed by what they had just heard.

"I... I can't... imagine..." Kaze mumbled, his voice leaden as it trailed off.

K groped for something to say, but was even more lost for words.

"Does... Master Saotome know about this?" Kaze ventured.

"Nah. He doesn't care. And I like it that way," the Dread Knight said bluntly. "He doesn't need to hear my sob story or about how much of a loser I am. He's seen enough of that since we met up."

"Also, he might be a little upset at all the genocide," K said, still sounding dazed.

"Yeah, that too," Rayden admitted. "Anyway, that's the short version. Now you know why I don't toss around the 'avatar' title or really talk about my past. And hopefully you've given up on that nonsense about teaching demons to be civil."

"Not at all!" Kaze said sauddenly, standing upright as his voiced flushed with emotion. "Your... society, if I may call it that, is clearly capable of law and order! Well, actually, you already have a fair bit of that already! It's just a bit... too lethal and indiscriminate!"

Rayden sweatdropped as the evon looked even more determined. "Besides, even if demons are inevitably inclined to violent behavior, that still doesn't preclude civil coexistence! There are many legitimate applications for savage violence! What army doesn't employ a few demonic shock troopers nowadays?"

Rayden rolled his eyes as he stepped back from his cooking. "Yeah, okay, whatever you say."

"I'm serious! And why should someone like yourself have to suffer for failing to meet the pointless and absurd expectations of your peers?"

Rayden growled slightly as he turned to the evon. "Look, don't start preaching to me, all right? I told you the stupid story because you wouldn't stop bugging me, not because I wanted your sympathy! My 'peers' judge me to be weak because I am! I don't need to be told that I'm strong enough, I need to stand atop a mountain of corpses and PROVE it!"

_SHUNK! _As if to punctuate the exclamation, a trio of talons burning with a strange green energy suddenly burst from Rayden's stomach, having impaled him from behind.

"Ooh... That's not a good start," K mumbled, grimacing as he watched blood and bile seep from the wound as the magical blades withdrew from their target.

While Kaze seemed stunned by the sudden attack, Rayden released an inarticulate cry of rage and swung around, sweeping a backhand blindly at roughly shoulder level.

His fury was rewarded by a savage cracking noise, and a shabbily-armored corpse shimmered into visibility as it went sailing through the air, eventually skidding across the rocky ground and leaving a long furrow in the dirt.

"We're under attack!" Kaze shouted, activating a series of prepared spells that instantly erected a series of magical barriers around him.

Those barriers crackled and seethed as a pair of claws brushed against the exterior shield, causing glowing runes to flare brightly as sparks of green danced across its surface.

K, being by far the most vulnerable, quickly shrunk back to his draconic form just as a trio of bright green arcs sliced through where his human throat had been.

"It's those things! Those things from the village!" The metadragon cried as he took off, gaining altitude as quickly as he could.

"What the hell're you talking about?" Rayden demanded as he drew his sword, glancing about but seeing no targets. Blood still seeped freely from his abdominal wound, but he ignored it with ease as his mind concentrated fully on the battle at hand.

"Invisible zombies!" K shouted. "They'll surround you before they attack!"

"Invisible ZOMBIES? That's ridic-" was a far as Rayden got before a curling trail of emerald flame drilled into his throat.

The Dread Knight wasted no time in guessing the location of his assailant, as a broad horizontal sweep sent two halves of the iron-masked abomination spinning wildly through the air.

"Augh! Klaugh!" Rayden promptly staggered after the strike, grasping his neck and gasping painfully.

"Invisibility, is it?" Kaze muttered darkly as more claws brushed lightly across his barriers, leaving shimmering trails of dissipating green. The creatures assaulting him weren't committing to an attack yet, seeing that he wasn't as vulnerable as his larger ally yet.

"Hmph! Don't think such simple illusions will work on me!" Kaze boomed as he held his staff into the air. "Those who hide behind deceptions and within shadows, let the light of your judgment be your undoing! Reveal yourself, scum! Illumination of Agoth!"

A corona of light surrounded the Eye of Malakai, and it swiftly built into a shimmering halo that exploded across the field all around them.

The effect was instantaneous: dozens of thin, shriveled-looking humanoids with their faces masked with iron and their hands replaced by three-taloned claws staggered backward as they were revealed to mundane sight, as if physically clubbed by the undoing of their crucial magics.

Blinking away the magical light, the jakku swiftly shifted back into their attack formation, not making any adjustements to account for their sudden exposure. Formed up in loose packs that hunched down roughly ten feet away from their prey, Kaze could now see that the undead assassins had been making attack runs at them one at a time, no doubt testing their reactions.

Unusually cautious for undead. He couldn't help but wonder if there was a directing influence among the creatures.

"Shikodan! Can you still fight?" Kaze shouted as he pulled a book from beneath his robes.

Rayden held up three fingers as he continued holding a hand over his bleeding throat, still gasping painfully.

"Understood," Kaze said as the book floated from his hand and opened before him, the pages flipping of their own accord until they reached the appropriate page. "Blighted undead! May the searing light of Heaven cleanse the flesh from your wasted bones! Astral Cutlass!"

With a sharp horizontal arc of his finger in front of him, a thin beam of bright white light blasted from the priest's fingertip and swept across the line of skulking zombies. Blinding flares of light bloomed where the beam gouged deeply into the dank, twisted flesh of its targets, and great pyres of radiant flame sawed across the ground from the sweeping arc.

Kaze quickly started flipping through the book once more to the next spell, subconsciously aware that the jakku were reorganizing themselves after the last attack. "K! Go find Master Saotome, would you? We may need the help if they have reinforcements!"

"Right! On my way!" the metadragon shouted as he took off away from the battlefield.

Kaze turned his hand out toward Rayden as he saw four of the jakku break their line to finish off the wounded swordsman. "White Wing!"

Bolts of sparking light burst from Kaze's hand and flew in wild, unpredictable arcs around Rayden, slamming into each jakku and eliciting a hollow, gasping scream from behind the plates of metal bolted over their faces.

As the creatures staggered, however, one of them regained the initiative and darted for its target, unheeding of the wisps of mystical smoke that poured from its side. Twisting as it approached the gasping demon, it brought its claws up toward the abdomen to tear at the wound that already existed there.

Instead, it found its wrist caught by an impossibly strong grip as a pair of crimson eyes glowered at it.

"Annoying little bastards," Rayden growled as he hauled the jakku up by its wrist and then grabbed its hip. His throat, which had previously leaked blood profusely, was whole once more, the wound covered by a seething black substance that resembled pitch, but melded with Rayden's skin as if it was a part of it.

With a contemptuous grunt, Rayden tore the jakku in two, and then threw each body part into one of the other jakku that had been charging him. The last one earned a backhand that sent it flailing through the air as the Dread Knight recovered his sword.

Kaze unleashed another volley of light bolts as the jakku began to scatter. "Ah! You're back early! I thought you were going to need three minutes!"

"What are you talking about?" Rayden growled as a sweep of his blade launched an energy wave into the assassins. "Three fingers means three seconds!"

Kaze blinked. "Oh... well, in that case, you're a bit late, aren't you?"

"Deal with it!" The Dread Knight snapped as he charged recklessly into the swarm of undead, his fury burning in his eyes as black whips of electricity seethed around his arms.

Kaze sighed as he thrust out a hand to the side. "Light Nova!" Another few jakku screeched as they were incinerated by the brilliant magical energy, but the priest of Malakai couldn't help but notice that they weren't as bunched up as before, and were therefore harder to destroy en masse.

Of course, that made it easier for Rayden to butcher them one by one, and Kaze could see out of the corner of his eye that the demonic paladin was taking up the challenge with gusto, reducing jakku after jakku to piles of chopped meat and shredded metal.

'But why aren't they attacking?' the evon mused as he moved on to his next spell, the book before him flipping rapidly through its litany of rituals. "Well, it's a bit conventional for my taste, but still effective. FIREBALL!"

A sphere of roaring flame erupted from his outstretched palms as the Eye of Malakai glowed softly, lending its power to the deadly magics and turning the flames from a furious red to a purifying white.

_BWOOM!_ The explosion was intense as its washed through the dry trees and rock outcroppings, sending flaming bodies every which way as magical fire cleansed rotting flesh from enchanted bone.

Kaze once again took a moment to review the battlefield, and frowned as he found himself surrounded, with the dozen or so surviving jakku slowly circling him at a range of about thirty feet.

'Are they really going to just stand there and let themselves be destroyed at range? Hmph. The strategy of the dead, I suppose,' the priest thought as he once again summoned motes of light to his hands.

_Crack!_ It was only his precautionary barriers that saved his life. A thick length of wood, capped by a barbed spearhead, shattered in front of his eyes as his outermost shield collapsed.

The evon stumbled backward as the spell's patterns slipped from his thoughts, his attention now focused entirely on the battle before him. "Wh-Where did that come from?" He gasped. The shot had come straight at his face, and yet it had appeared out of nowhere. That meant...

All became clear as a vile, giant creature stepped within the magical field that bared the invisible to mortal eyes. Its mask was an all-encompassing helmet, devoid of vision slits, and thick plates of metal were bolted directly into its undead bulk. On its arms Kaze saw the source of the unexpected attack: a huge repeater crossbow bolted directly onto its grubby arm. Its other arm ended in a maul rather than a hand, and this appendage hung limply as the huge zombie lumbered forward.

"Even in ambush, the undead are foolish and predictable," Kaze mumbled as his hands blazed yellow with power. "Fires of the justicar, become... my... uh..."

The priest trailed off as three more of the massive undead stomped into the radius of his enchantment exposing themselves to bare sight. Each one bore an oversized crossbow, though their other arm seemed to be a large melee weapon chosen somewhat at random: a massive butcher's knife, an axe, and the remaining two had hooks and sickles crammed into their ragged wrists to approximate claws.

It was, however, the crossbows that most concerned Kaze as the massive zombies stopped where they were and took aim.

"Shield! Shield! SHIELD!" Kaze called out as a trio of heavy bolts went flying toward him, smashing against his barriers with such force that Kaze staggered and was forced to lean against his staff in his efforts to keep his defenses up.

The fourth bolt was a wild miss, most due to the creature's arm being sliced off and sent rolling onto the ground.

"Hey, it's those hammaku things!" Rayden said as he drew Darkrune around for a second swing, slicing deep into the zombie's side before hauling the blade up and separating its shoulder from the rest of the body. "Haven't seen one of these since China!"

The hammaku, now bereft of its weapons, tried to simply trample the Dread Knight, but as it barged forward Rayden smashed it out of the way with his free hand on his way to the next target.

As Kaze tried to keep his shields up to defend himself, he suddenly felt a new pressure on his barriers, and as he whirled around he saw that the smaller jakku that were left were now assaulting him en masse, scraping their claws against his barrier and climbing over themselves to batter his shields.

"Shikodan, please dispose of the large ones, please!" Kaze requested as he took a deep breath and shifted his mental focus once more to offensive magic, his shields crumbling swiftly.

"Devastating breath of the eastern winds, cold reaching from every corner of the land, become my weapon! Rimehammer!"

Miming a haymaker with a glowing fist, a surge of needle-covered hailstones blasted forth in front of him, pushed by a fierce wind that staggered the oncoming jakku even as the ice cut and bludgeoned them.

Kaze pulled up his staff, calming his mind as he searched for another incantation to stem the tide of enemies.

_BLAM!_ One jakku's chest burst outward as a bullet tore into its back and exploded out through its breast plate, sending it to the ground once more.

"Oops, sorry. Zombie. Forgot. I need a head shot, don't I?" Ranma asked as he hopped down from a rock outcropping.

"Master Saotome!" Kaze cried. "You're just in time! I was very nearly at the end of my rope!"

Ranma casually fired off two more rounds that send two more trembling jakku back down permanently, and then raised an eyebrow. "Really? It looks to me like you two have this handled, actually." He glanced back at Rayden.

_Clang!_ The hammaku grunted blandly as it chopped down with its cleaver-arm, the rust-caked and obnoxiously heavy blade banging uselessly against Darkrune's edge as the Dread Knight blocked.

Pushing aside his foe's weapon, Rayden promptly speared the hammaku straight through its chest plate, laughing as he heard the tip erupt from the zombie's back and punch through a leather binding there.

With an inexplicable burst of black lightning, Rayden sliced upward through the hammaku's body, ripping his sword free amongst a fountain of rot and gore.

Ranma turned away as the dark paladin descended on the last hammaku. "I'm sure you would've done fine."

The pigtailed man deflected a slash away from his face with a long knife, and then sunk a handaxe into the jakku that split its iron mask and skull alike straight open.

"As I've said before, the acceptable margin of error that separates life and death just becomes so much more... forgiving when you're around," Kaze offered, looking quite happy to take a step further back as he prepared his next spell. "Light of Voma!"

A beam of light crashed into another jakku, causing it to convulse briefly before disintegrating on the spot, its flesh burning away from the leather, metal, and bone that remained once the spell had run its course.

Ranma grunted disapprovingly as he dashed under another attacker, and then planted the long knife into the back of its head before grabbing the hilt of a katana at his hip.

"I've got the last one," Ranma said casually as he started to draw.

"Hey, whoa, wait!" the sword called out, "don't use me to cut down one of those grimy corpses! I don't want that thing all over me!"

Ranma halted as a vein popped up on his head. "Well, too bad! It's time to show what you can do!"

Dodging backwards from a claw that trailed green fire, Ranma leaned forward and then drew Gehenna from the katana's sheathe that he had kept her in, aiming to decapitate the jakku in one motion.

He failed utterly in this endeavor as he found that the blade extending from the hilt was little longer than a butter knife.

"Hey! What do you think you're doing?" Ranma demanded as he blocked the jakku's lunge with his gauntlet.

"You wanted to see what I can do, right? Well, I can keep you from mucking up my edge when there's no point to it," Gehenna snapped. "You have plenty of ammunition and blades, you don't need me to kill that thing."

Ranma kicked back at the jakku as it tried to claw at his face, knocking it onto its back. "That's not the point, damn it! You can't just decide not to work when you don't want to!"

"Don't treat me like some rusty, expendable dagger!" Gehenna shouted back.

_Zyow!_ The jakku screeched as Kaze hit it with a light beam, disintigrating it on the spot.

"There. I got it. Please, stop fighting," Kaze deadpanned as he lowered his hand.

"What kind of useless weapon refuses to kill worthless mooks like that? What're you going to do when I'm actually fighting something important?" Ranma growled.

"Don't call me useless!" Gehenna shouted. "If you don't need me, then don't bother me!"

"Who would need a **useless** weapon that doesn't want to fight?" Ranma countered.

"WHAT DID I JUST SAY?"

Kaze sighed as he started rubbing his forehead. "This doesn't bode well going forward," the evon grumbled as he turned away from his master and his master's new headache. "Shikodan, are you well?"

Rayden had apparently chopped the arms off of the last hammaku and was now straddling the undead beast and punching it in the face again and again, slowly reducing the creature's head into a stinking pulp.

"Are you having fun?" the priest deadpanned as he walked over to the dark avatar.

"Eh, a little," Rayden admitted as he pulled his hands back. Writhing darkness seemed to wrap around his fingers and palms, and the Dread Knight grasped either side of the hammaku's head as he mumbled an incoherent chant.

_BWOOM!_ Kaze winced as the hammaku's head exploded between Rayden's hands, sending a deep shudder through the rest of its flabby body before falling still.

"Undead aren't much fun to kill," Rayden said as he stood up, smoke trailing from his hands as he wiped his face with his forearm, "they don't bleed much, they don't scream or get mad, and Darkrune won't consume their blood."

"Quite troublesome. The Third disparages necromancy on principle, does it not?"

"Yeah, well, it's mostly because..." Rayden trailed off as he noticed Ranma standing a ways behind the evon, seemingly arguing with his own sword. "Wait, hold that thought."

"I don't think it's too much to ask that I get the same respect as the others," Gehenna insisted as the knife in Ranma's hand started to glow brightly.

Ranma let go of Gehenna as she reverted to her human form, clearly frustrated beyond all reason. "The others don't GET any respect. They're a bunch of overpowered idiot children who can barely set up a camp site without my help. If there's any difference between the way I treat them and the way I treat you, it's probably because they actually do their jobs!"

Gehenna shifted into her human form, promptly crossing her arms uner her breasts. "I'm not going to budge on this issue. Things like this are the reason I didn't want to continue being a mere weapon in the first place. I despise being constantly thrust and smashed into disgusting and hazardous bodies."

"You turn into a SWORD! What the hell else am I going to do with you?" Ranma protested, throwing his arms up in the air.

"I do not object to your use of me earlier, against the golem," the redhead said firmly, "in fact, you should-"

Any further lecturing was cut short as the demonic weapon felt her head being seized from behind, and her breath caught in her throat as her expression darkened.

"My, my, first battle and already trying to nag him to death? Isn't that just like a woman?" Rayden said acidly, leaning over Gehenna's shoulder as he glared coldly at her.

"S-Second battle, actually," Gehenna corrected, sweat starting to roll down her brow. "Not that it really matters, I suppose, but it should-" she yelped and stopped talking as she felt the fingers around her skull dig into her.

"Ray, give it a rest," Ranma said, sighing. As annoying as Gehenna was being, seeing the larger demon bully her didn't make him happy either. "And as for you, why are you so afraid of Rayden, anyway? You eat magical weapons, don't you?"

Gehenna nodded silently as Rayden snorted and let go of her. "I do. But the dread blade Darkrune is... different."

"It is kind of a big deal," Kaze agreed, nodding as he walked by. "The creations of mere wizards and artificers, however wonderous, pale in comparison to the devices granted to us by the gods."

"Okay, fine, so you're saying that you can't eat Darkrune, so you're afraid of it?" Ranma asked.

"I'm saying that if I so much as touched that blade, it's essence would tear me apart, or at least corrupt me beyond recognition," Gehenna grumbled, "the results are almost beyond imagining. I might take on some of Darkrune's traits, or start generating energy discharges, or simply become insane..."

She trailed off once she realized that the two avatars were now looking at her intently, and not in the way that men usually looked at her intently.

"I'd like to see that, actually," Kaze mused, rubbing his chin. "I've only seen one actual case of magical corruption before, and it proved very difficult to observe. But in this case..."

"I'll bet she'd stop complaining as much, that's for sure," Rayden said as he drew a finger along Darkrune's edge. A creeping blue glow followed his touch, and Kaze could swear he could hear someone nearby whispering faintly.

As Gehenna gaped helplessly, Ranma stepped in front of her and casually smacked Rayden in the forehead. "I SAID give it a rest. You're not going to corrupt, kill, or otherwise hurt her, all right? You don't have to treat her like part of the team, but she's no guinea pig."

Kaze bowed immediately as Rayden nodded reluctantly.

"Fine, you're the boss," the dark paladin mumbled. "If we're not going to be tormenting Gehenna, then we should get on our way. Where's K?"

Ranma shrugged. "We left K with Jerry."

Rayden blinked. "Who's Jerry?"

* * *

"So you're telling me that construct consciousness is a result of enhanced **behavioral** programming rather than **logic** programming?" K asked as he perched atop the massive stone creature.

Jerry nodded slightly as he lumbered along the path, walking on two of his hands as well as his legs to make up for those limbs he had lost. "The spell involves patterning a 'false soul' in the image of a true, biological mind, not threading together dozens of possible stimuli and determining certain responses. It only seems that way because of the difficulty of properly fashioning emotional responses within the construct's nascent consciousness."

K nodded, fascinated. "It makes so much sense... but you seem perfectly capable of emotional responses. Was your consciousness created using a different method?"

"Same method, higher quality!" Jerry said proudly as he began scaling one of the larger rock outcroppings, pulling himself up over a huge spire of obsidian. "Lord Karl is an artificer of the highest quality! Even a construct of my level, one in a million, is but a minor chore for Master!"

Jerry finished cresting the rocks, his head gazing out over the empty wasteland that stretched out before them. "Still, I would dare say I'm a **bit** special, even to him! Giving golems emotions can be dangerous, after all, and I was widely considered one of the more stable creations."

K felt the body underneath him shake slightly as Jerry chuckled (which was curious, given that the body wans't at all involved in the process of speaking).

"So really, I suppose I really am one in a million!"

_BWAKOOOM!_

K wasn't entirely sure what had happened; one moment he had been sitting atop the suspiciously English golem, speaking about artificial consciousness theory, and the next he was bouncing along the ground, his arms and legs numb from an energy surge and the massive concussive force that had followed it.

He skidded to a stop atop a patch of hardened dirt, his ears ringing as he tried to piece together what had just happened.

The picture became abundantly clear once he heard Rayden's voice.

"Ha! Lookit that burst radius! Perfect casting!" the Dread Knight said as he stepped past a dead tree. "Oh, hi K. What's wrong?"

Ranma frowned slightly as he came up behind the demonic swordsman. "That was Jerry."

Rayden blinked. "What? Jerry who?"

"That thing," Ranma said, gesturing vaguely to the bits of scorched rubble that had been scattered all over the devastated outcropping. "That was Jerry."

"Oh... was I not supposed to do that?" Rayden asked sheepishly, glancing back at Gehenna and Kaze.

The redhead just shrugged. "Eh, it doesn't make much difference. It's just a golem."

"Yeah, sure. Who cares? They're just sentient dolls, like living swords," K grumbled, still laying on the ground.

Gehenna frowned and then glanced at her fellow demon. "Why do people keep comparing me to that obnoxious magic doll?"

"Now, see, the REAL question you should be asking," Rayden deadpanned, "is how you can avoid meeting the same end."

"All right, all of you shut up," Ranma said as he picked K off the ground and started dusting him off. "I found out where those jakku things are coming from, so with or without Jerry, I have our new destination."

Kaze's eyes lit up. "Oh? Where are we headed, then?"

"Upper Mongolia, and then to the bone fortress of Genex Karl!" Ranma said, stabbing a finger northward as his cape billowed out behind him.

Rayden and Gehenna smirked silently at the sight, imagining the plunder and bloodshed that awaited them.

Kaze looked embarrassed and rubbed the back of his head. "Uh... actually..."

Ranma broke his dramatic pose and glanced backwards as K crawled up onto his head. "Yeah? What is it now?"

"Oh, it's nothing important... persay..." Kaze hedged as he found himself the center of attention. "It's just that Karl's territories were actually going to be the first target of my own campaign."

"The one that you called off because of a dragon attack?" Rayden asked. "So what?"

"Well, it's not a big deal or anything," Kaze ventured, fiddling with his hands, "but there may be a SLIGHT chance of... complications... because of that."

Ranma raised an eyebrow. "Complications? Like what?"

* * *

"Bishop Saima!"

Belmarinkal Saima barely glanced behind her as a human in gleaming white armor pulled open the flap opening to the command tent, bowing deeply as he did so.

"A moment, paladin, I am busy," the elf said firmly, still facing forward toward the other occupants of the tent waited calmly for her. "Please, continue."

A high priest with bright golden skin stood at the other end of the table, flanked by a pair of elderly monks leaning on staffs. He too was elven, and his hands were slowly moving in intricate patterns as his fingers trailed glittering motes of light, although the man hardly seemed aware of what he was doing.

"As I said, the avatar is alive and well. Perhaps... too well," the male elf said, stiffening somewhat. "My divinations have revealed a wealth of information, and yet it makes no sense. The avatar Toren is alive and well, in sound health and mind, and free from black spell or artifice."

One of the monks coughed roughly before he spoke. "And yet he makes no attempt to contact his church or give word of his condition."

The other monk shook her head. "There may be factors beyond our detection that bar communication or attempt to deceive us."

The golden elf straightened. "This is the result of our deliberations. The visions press us forward to the east, among the demon lord Karl's bone fortress. There the light of Malakai will cut through the darkness and cast down the shambling horrors of the demon."

Then the diviner frowned. "And there are... other concerns. A lingering, bloody darkness follows behind the beacon, lurking in the shadows of another that walks in the light. It is... strange."

The elf shook his head, and his hands fell still at last. "What are your thoughts, Belmarinkal?"

The bishop tried to hide an annoyed twitch in her eyebrow. Unlike the prophets and advisors, she knew Kaze personally, and could easily believe that the imbecile would get distracted by exciting circumstances or some winsome maiden and forget all about his associates in the Circle that have been looking for him ever since his departure. At the same time, however, it was still possible that the prophets were right, and that Kaze's apparent safety was a ruse to slow them down.

'Even after he outranks and leaves me, I still have to play babysitter to that idiot,' Saima thought bitterly.

"I will think on the best course of action, but for now we should make ready to advance, as planned," the bishop said with an edge of frustration.

"The situation may be more dire than that. We still cannot contact the avatar via magic," said the female monk.

Saima couldn't help a slight growl from escaping her lips. "The Eye of Malakai reacts unconsciously to the will of its user, and protects, often without the user's express intent, them from scrying and other such magics that need to search the astral sea blindly for one soul among billions. Of course, Toren didn't wait to learn the exact properties of the Eye, so he probably doesn't know how to drop or modify such defenses to allow benign effects."

The other elf looked slightly perturbed, and his hands started moving again. "You seem somewhat upset by something, bishop. Are you well?"

"It's... nothing. Almost running into that charnel house that remained of Greken's territories has me on edge," the bishop grumbled, forcing calm into her voice.

The other monk nodded. "Understandable. However, I advise that we force march the army for as long as our troops can bear it. We MUST reach the bone fortress before something happens to Toren."

Saima stopped herself from rolling her eyes and nodded seriously. "Very well. I will consider this information at length. For today, however, the troops rest," she insisted. "High Priest Seth, you are dismissed."

Saima sighed deeply before finally gesturing over her shoulder. "Speak, paladin."

The man grunted unpleasantly, annoyed that she still hadn't turned around, even after he had waited for her. "Bishop, there is an intruder at the camp's edge. He calls himself Kais, and demands to speak to the individual in charge."

Saima grimaced. "I have no time for nonsense like this. Take the matter to... Chiima, I guess."

The paladin sighed and nodded. "Yes, Bishop. By your leave."

Leaving the tent and mumbling irritably the whole time, the paladin trudged across the camp toward the periphery, where the guard detail was currently holding the intruder.

The camp was very elaborate, with an air of opulence that honestly didn't sit well with some of the more battle-hardened soldiers; great white tents stood high above the trees, brightly colored pendants whipped about in the wind, and servants constantly rushed in and out of the rear of the camp to the train of supply wagons that were parked behind the main force. These wagons contained more in the way of fine clothing, books, and personal treasures of the clergy than supplies and weapons, and the rangers hired to guide the force had pointed out frequently that they were a prime target for raiders and thieves, especially if the nobles and ecclesiarchs wouldn't let the wagons clutter up the center of the camp where they would be much safer.

The paladin squared his shoulders, banishing his petty resentment and finding focus in the task at hand. For good or ill, he would do his best to resolve the situation without the bishop's guidance or authority.

When he walked up to the circle of paladins surrounding Kais, he noticed that they seemed to be arguing heatedly about something. The paladins all looked very annoyed, although none of them looked poised to harm the golden-haired man.

As he moved closer, he could hear the tail-end of a squad sergeant's argument.

"-has been involved in a dozen campaigns in the last year alone! We have as much right to be here as anyone else!"

Kais snorted as he looked around at the men and women in gleaming armor. Three of them were elves, one was an evon, three more were angels, and the last was one of the blue-skinned, thick-haired harlock demons.

"None of your kind should be here," Kais said imperiously, crossing his arms over his chest. "You're not part of the plan. You weren't born in this realm, were you?"

The harlock stepped forward, jabbing an armored thumb into his chestplate. "I'll have you know that I completed my training here on Earth realm, fighting the raiders in Turkey! My future is in this realm!"

"My wife is having a child here!" Said another paladin, snorting. "So should my firstborn leave this realm too?"

Kais' eyes narrowed. "Of course. You are not needed. You are not wanted. Your presence here is an aberration, and it would be best corrected willingly."

"Hey now, what's this about?"

The other paladins stepped back as the human paladin approached, and Kais brightened.

"Ah! Human! I was just telling these individuals-"

"I heard what you were telling them," the paladin murmured, "and it makes no sense." He turned to one of the angels, and nodded. "Go get the captain."

Kais shook his head as the winged paladin left. "Of course you are not aware, but the state of this realm is not right. These creatures should not be here. This is a human planet."

"I am quite aware, actually," the human mumbled. "Earth is new to the realms, and it has a history of complete isolation. Its primary species is human, and until recently they were unaware of other sentient races."

Kais frowned. "I see. This was not forseen."

"I'm sure the humans of Earth realm share that sentiment," the paladin drawled. "The discovery of the demons and mystical races was accompanied with much bloodshed."

"You speak as if you're not one of them," Kais said, gazing at the human paladin critically.

The human shrugged. "I am not. My name is Demeter Loken, and I grew up in Kelmath realm. I just happen to like it here."

Many of the other paladins nodded in agreement, their earlier irritation abated. Although Earth realm was dangerous and lacked much of the magnificence of many of the realms, it also had the most amazing and convenient technologies available for ease of living and entertainment; it was amazing how little Earth humans seemed to appreciate, say, a refrigerator, which would have been a marvel of tremendous value nearly everywhere else.

Kais shook his head. "Then you too do not belong. How did this happen..."

Demeter snorted. "For all your complaints, you do not seem like a mundane human to me, Kais. Do you belong here?"

"I do," the golden-hair magi said simply, "I am the architect."

The paladins waited for several seconds for him to elaborate. They were disappointed.

"Did you mean 'an' architect?" one of the elves asked.

Kais frowned, looking irritated. "Never mind. It's not a matter to discuss with your kind. What of my request? Who is in charge of this force?"

"Bishop Saima has refused to see you," said the human paladin bluntly. "Instead, you may speak to Captain Chiima of our order of pala-hey! Where are you going?"

Kais didn't bother to look over his shoulder as he walked away. "I have no need to speak to some warrior. If your leaders will not see me, then I'm wasting my time here. There are many pieces yet left to collect."

"Pieces? Pieces of what?" mumbled the harlock. Kais didn't answer, however, and the paladins watched the magi's back until they finally lost sight of him amongst the sparse woods surrounding the encampment.

"Demeter! Report!" called a voice from behind the group, and the man in question jumped slightly before he whirled around and bowed.

"Captain Chiima! My apologies, but it seems that the intruder has left already."

Chiima frowned as he glanced over the heads of his subordinates, into the forest. "He escaped?"

"He was not detained," explained an elf. "As he was unarmed and seemed to have no harmful intentions, we thought such measures would be frowned upon."

Chiima considered the reasoning and then nodded. "Very well, then. If there's nothing else, I want you all to retire to the barracks early."

Demeter blinked. "Captain? Is something happening?"

"We're going to be marching all the way to the bone fortress through the night and should arrive by tomorrow evening, and I intend to volunteer my squad as a vanguard for any assaults that may become necessary once the enemy is in sight. Though I do not doubt that your valor would not falter from missing a night's rest, we need to be at our absolute best when we meet the foe, and inspire the rest of the force to push forward."

All of the paladins straightened at their captain's words, each one feeling pride and fervor well up in their hearts.

"Yes, Captain! We will offer our thanks to Malakai and then proceed to the barracks as ordered!"

Chiima nodded, gazing out at the mountains that lay ahead of them. "Indeed. Much rests on our shoulders, paladins. Avatar Toren's life is in our hands!"

"Yes, Captain! For Malakai! For justice!"

* * *

End Chapter 18 


End file.
